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THE 


G-reat Men of God. 

*. 

BIOGRAPHIES 

OP 

Patriarchs, Prophets, Kings and Apostles, 


8ELECTED PROM THE WORKS OF DOCTOR GUTHRIE, DEAN STANLEY, BISHOP 
OXEN DEN, AND OTHER EMINENT DIVINES. 

WITH 

ORIGINAL SKETCHES 


EY 

• \\\ 

Rev. W. F. P. NOBLE. 

»l 

FORMING 


A CONCISE BIBLE HISTORY AND GALLERY OF SACRED PORTRAITS 

* 


WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY I. W. WILEY. 


TIVEL VE STEEL ENGRA VINES. 


« 



NEW YORK: 

NELSON & PHILLIPS, 

805 BROADWAY. 

1876. 


i 


I 



Entered according to Act of Conaress, in the year 1873, by 

NELSON & PHILLIPS, 

in the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Wasmngton. 




By ft* ah mi #9 ^ 

Army And Navy 

Ang. 13J92S 



c>+ 




CONTENTS 


PAG* 

INTRODUCTION ]? 


I. 

ADAM. 

OUR FIRST FATHER. 

Made in God’s Image — Splendor of his Inheritance — Naming of the Animals — 

The Germ of Science — The Gift of Speech — Alone in Paradise — Creation of 
Woman — Perfection of the First Pair — Their Garden-home — Its Matchless 
Beauty and Countless Attractions — The Devil enters this Scene of Bliss — He 
selects the Weaker Vessel — Eve Falls, and Adam with her — Every Sense and 
Faculty Blighted by Sin — Our First Parents Driven from Paradise — A Gleam 
of Hope — The First Promise — The First Sacrifice — The First Death — Increase 
of the Race — Culture and Progress — Death of Adam — So all must pass away. 27 


II. 


NOAH. 




f. 


THE PREACHER OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. 


The World before the Flood — Long Life and abounding Wickedness — One Man 
Faithful — Always a Remnant of Grace — A Respite before the Blow Falls — 
The Building of the Ark — Scoffs of the Ungodly — Noah Builds and Preaches 
— Vengeance Poured Out — The Race Swept Away — The Little Company 
Saved — Lessons of the Life of Noah — The Preaching of the Daily Life — All 
may thus show the Power of Religion 


38 


III. 

ABRAHAM. 

THE FRIEND OF GOD. 

Venerated alike by Jews, Christians and Mohammedans — The Father of a Na- 
tion — Founder of the Oldest Family in the World — Patriarch of the Church 
— His Likeness seen in his Descendants — Purity of the Jewish Blood — Preju- 
dices against the Hebrew Race — Illustration of this in Paintings of the Old 

3 


f 


4 CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Masters — Oppression of Ages — Beauty of Sarah and of the Jewish Women — 
Beauty a Source of Innocent Pleasure — Intellectual Pre-eminence of Abraham’s 
Race — Great Men Selected for Great Ends — Abraham an Example of this — 
Great in Mental and in Moral Endowments — God Works by Means and not 
by Miracles — Attacks on the Bible — Theory of Human Progress — Abraham’s 
Ancestors Idolaters — His Father a Maker of Images — The Sabean Faith — 
Worship of the Sun — Legend of Abraham’s Conversion — His Courteousness — 
Interview with the Angels — His Generosity — Lot’s Choice — Rescue of Lot — 
Magnanimity of Abraham — His Tenderness of Heart — Intercession for Sodom 
— His Faith and Piety — Offering up of Isaac — Equivocation Touching Sarah 
— The Friend of God and Father of the Faithful 42 


IV. 

ELIEZER. 

THE PATTERN SERVANT. 

Damascus — Its Great Antiquity — Webs of Silk and Weapons of Steel — “ Pearl of 
the East” — Mohammed — The Cradle of the Race — Nimrod — The Mists of 
Four Thousand Years — Damascus the Birthplace of Eliezer — Servants Hon- 
ored by the Bible — Called to Adorn the Doctrines of God — Advantages of a 
Life of Domestic Service — Eliezer a Slave — One Million Servants in Great 
Britain — A Bible Model for this Class — Fidelity — Eliezer’s Marriage Em- 
bassy — His Prayer — Meets Rebecca at the Well — Woos her for Isaac — His 
Diligence — His Piety — Better Masters would make Better Servants — Faults 
in both Classes — Victoria’s Monument to a Faithful Servant 68 


V. 

ISAAC. 

THE CHILD OF PROMISE. 

Few Points of Interest in his Career — Quiet, Retiring Disposition — Pious from In- 
fancy — Mocked by Ishmael — The Joy of his Parents — A Damper put upon 
their Hopes — God’s Command to Slay Isaac — His Patient Submission — 
Mount Moriah — The Cup Averted — Isaac’s Marriage — Evening Meditation — 
Contemplative Habits — Happy, Peaceful Life — But not all Brightness — Death 
of Abraham — Isaac and Ishmael Reconciled at the Grave — Birth of Esau and 
Jacob — Partiality of the Parents — Deadly Feud of the Twin Brothers — Isaac 
Afflicted with Blindness — Deceived by Jacob — Trials Sent in Love 92 

VI. 

■ JACOB. 

THE WRESTLER WITH GOD. 


Jacob’s Estimate of his Own Life — Not a Perfect Character — Hence more in Sym- 
pathy with Universal Human Nature — Good and Evil Mingled in the Two 
Brothers — Esau, the Shaggy Huntsman, Open-hearted and Chivalrous — Jacob, 


CONTENTS. 


the Supplanter, Cautious and Conservative — Yet the Impulsive Hunter van- 
ishes away — The “ Canny ” persistent Jacob pushes on to prosperity — Not a 
Character to be Scoffed at — Domestic, Affectionate, Ripened by Sorrow — The 
Character of each Reproduced in his Posterity — The Turbulent Idumeans — 
The Jews of the Middle Ages — Neutrality of the Scripture Narrative — Esau 
Painted by the Rabbinical Authors — Lessons of the History — Fickleness and 
Weakness Ruin the Noble Esau — Steady Purpose and Self-denying Toil Ele- 
vate the Timid and Crafty Jacob — The Night Vision of Bethel— The Memo- 
rial Stone — Early Temples — Twenty Years with Laban — The Service of Love 
— A Good Shepherd — The Slave becomes a Prince — The Exile returns a 
Wealthy Chieftain — Wrestling with God — Israel — Peniel — The Brothers 
Meet — Characteristic Generosity of the One and Caution of the Other — Tran- 
sition from the Pastoral to the Agricultural — City of Shechem — Passionate 
Love and Grief of Jacob — Rachel’s Pillar — The Descent into Egypt — Death 
of the Patriarch — His Burial in Canaan 

VII. 

JOSEPH. 

THE SUCCESSFUL MAN. 

Matchless Pathos of the Story of Joseph — His Unique Experiences — Wonderful 
Vicissitudes — Lofty Morality of the Narrative — Analogies between the His- 
tories of Joseph and of Jesus — The Successful Man — The Child of Fortune — 
Bold Atheism of the Norseman — Divine Providence — Career of Louis Na- 
poleon — John Bunyan — Merchant Princes — From Caresses and Indulgence to 
the Blows and Tears and Chains of Slavery — From the Pit and the Prison to 
the Post of Prime Minister — The Captive Boy next in Rank to Pharaoh — 
This Success due to God — Special Providence — Yet Joseph the Architect 
of his own Fortune — Description in Palgrave’s Arabia — The Sailor must 
have Skill to use the Breeze — Joseph’s Piety and Virtue — His Wisdom and 
Sagacity — Promptness in seizing Opportunities — Shrewdness in making 
Friends of those who might some time Help Him — Mastery over himself — 
Decision of Character — Iron Will — Loving Heart — Ready Sympathy — Patient 
Endurance — Indomitable Energy — Sir Fowell Buxton to his Son 


VIII. 

JOB. 

THE EXAMPLE OF PATIENCE. 

Conspicuous not only for Patience in Adversity, but for Humility, Wisdom and 
Beneficence in Prosperity — An Upright Judge — The Priest of his Household — 
The Friend of the Poor — Sad Reverses — Property and Children swept 
away — Loathsome Disease — Tempted by his Wife — Deserted by his Friends — 
Miserable Comforters — “ Job, you must be a very wicked man” — Liars for 
God — Christ’s Rebuke of such Views — Job’s Defence — Denies that he is a 
Hypocrite — Admits his Imperfection — Sound Views of God’s Providence — 
Uniform Resignation and Reliance on God — The Clouds Disperse — Job Re- 
stored to Prosperity, and the Censorious Bigots Rebuked 


r 


4 CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Masters — Oppression of Ages — Beauty of Sarah and of the Jewish Women — 
Beauty a Source of Innocent Pleasure — Intellectual Pre-eminence of Abraham’s 
.Race — Great Men Selected for Great Ends — Abraham an Example of this — 
Great in Mental and in Moral Endowments — God Works by Means and not 
by Miracles — Attacks on the Bible — Theory of Human Progress — Abraham’s 
Ancestors Idolaters — His Father a Maker of Images — The Sabean Faith — 
Worship of the Sun — Legend of Abraham’s Conversion — His Courteousness — 
Interview with the Angels — His Generosity — Lot’s Choice — Rescue of Lot — 
Magnanimity of Abraham — His Tenderness of Heart — Intercession for Sodom 
— His Faith and Piety — Offering up of Isaac — Equivocation Touching Sarah 
— The Friend of God and Father of the Faithful 42 


IV. 

ELIEZER. 

THE PATTERN SERVANT. 

Damascus — Its Great Antiquity — Webs of Silk and Weapons of Steel — “ Pearl of 
the East ” — Mohammed — The Cradle of the Race — Nimrod — The Mists of 
Four Thousand Years — Damascus the Birthplace of Eliezer — Servants Hon- 
ored by the Bible — Called to Adorn the Doctrines of God — Advantages of a 
Life of Domestic Service — Eliezer a Slave — One Million Servants in Great 
Britain — A Bible Model for this Class — Fidelity — Eliezer’s Marriage Em- 
bassy — His Prayer — Meets Rebecca at the Well — Woos her for Isaac — His 
Diligence — His Piety — Better Masters would make Better Servants — Faults 
in both Classes — Victoria’s Monument to a Faithful Servant 68 


V. 

ISAAC. 

THE CHILD OF PROMISE. 

Few Points of Interest in his Career — Quiet, Retiring Disposition — Pious from In- 
fancy — Mocked by Ishmael — The Joy of his Parents — A Damper put upon 
their Hopes — God’s Command to Slay Isaac — His Patient Submission — 
Mount Moriah — The Cup Averted — Isaac’s Marriage — Evening Meditation — 
Contemplative Habits — Happy, Peaceful Life — But not all Brightness — Death 
of Abraham — Isaac and Ishmael Reconciled at the Grave — Birth of Esau and 
Jacob — Partiality of the Parents — Deadly Feud of the Twin Brothers — Isaac 
Afflicted with Blindness — Deceived by Jacob — Trials Sent in Love 92 

VI. 

' JACOB. 

THE WRESTLER WITH GOD. 

Jacob’s Estimate of his Own Life — Not a Perfect Character — Hence more in Sym- 
pathy with Universal Human Nature — Good and Evil Mingled in the Two 
Brothers — Esau, the Shaggy Huntsman, Open-hearted and Chivalrous — Jacob, 


CONTENTS. 


PAGES 

the Supplanter, Cautious and Conservative — Yet the Impulsive Hunter van • 
ishes away — The “Canny” persistent Jacob pushes on to prosperity — Not a 
Character to be Scoffed at — Domestic, Affectionate, Ripened by Sorrow — The 
Character of each Reproduced in his Posterity — The Turbulent Idumeans — 

The Jews of the Middle Ages — Neutrality of the Scripture Narrative — Esau 
Painted by the Rabbinical Authors — Lessons of the History — Fickleness and 
Weakness Ruin the Noble Esau — Steady Purpose and Self-denying Toil Ele- 
vate the Timid and Crafty Jacob — The Night Vision of Bethel — The Memo- 
rial Stone — Early Temples — Twenty Years with Laban — The Service of Love 
— A Good Shepherd — The Slave becomes a Prince — The Exile returns a 
AVealthy Chieftain — Wrestling with God — Israel — Peniel — The Brothers 
Meet — Characteristic Generosity of the One and Caution of the Other — Tran- 
sition from the Pastoral to the Agricultural — City of Shechem — Passionate 
Love and Grief of Jacob — Rachel’s Pillar — The Descent into Egypt — Death 
of the Patriarch — His Burial in Canaan 97 


VII. 

JOSEPH. 

THE SUCCESSFUL MAN. 

Matchless Pathos of the Story of Joseph — His Unique Experiences — Wonderful 
Vicissitudes — Lofty Morality of the Narrative — Analogies between the His- 
tories of Joseph and of Jesus — The Successful Man — The Child of Fortune — 
Bold Atheism of the Norseman — Divine Providence — Career of Louis Na- 
poleon — John Bunyan — Merchant Princes — From Caresses and Indulgence to 
the Blows and Tears and Chains of Slavery — From the Pit and the Prison to 
the Post of Prime Minister — The Captive Boy next in Rank to Pharaoh — 
This Success due to God — Special Providence — Yet Joseph the Architect 
of his own Fortune — Description in Palgrave’s Arabia — The Sailor must 
have Skill to use the Breeze — Joseph’s Piety and Virtue — His Wisdom and 
Sagacity — Promptness in seizing Opportunities — Shrewdness in making 
Friends of those who might some time Help Him — Mastery over himself — 
Decision of Character — Iron Will — Loving Heart — Ready Sympathy — Patient 
Endurance — Indomitable Energy — Sir Fowell Buxton to his Son Ill 

VIII. 

JOB. 

THE EXAMPLE OF PATIENCE. 

Conspicuous not only for Patience in Adversity, but for Humility, Wisdom and 
Beneficence in Prosperity — An Upright Judge — The Priest of his Household — 

The Friend of the Poor — Sad Reverses — Property and Children swept 
away — Loathsome Disease — Tempted by his Wife — Deserted by his Friends — 
Miserable Comforters — “Job, you must be a very wicked man” — Liars for 
God — Christ’s Rebuke of such Views — Job’s Defence — Denies that he is a 
Hypocrite — Admits his Imperfection — Sound Views of God’s Providence — 
Uniform Resignation and Reliance on God — The Clouds Disperse — Job Re- 
stored to Prosperity, and the Censorious Bigots Rebuked 130 


8 


CONTENTS. 


P46E 


as Judge — Misconduct of his Sons — The People demand a King — Ilis Per- 
plexity — His Address at Gilgal — His Relations with Saul — Revelations as 
Prophet — Popular Reverence for him — His Parting with Saul — The First of 
a Regular Succession of Prophets — Schools of the Prophets — The Spiritual 
Father of David — His Death 228 


XVII. 

SAUL. 

THE FIRST HEBREW KING. 

Unity of every Man’s History — Pairs of Events occurring in Life — Is Saul among 
the Prophets? — Stripping the Bible Narrative of its Mystical Character — This 
not True Philosophj’ — An Invisible Agency at Work — God gave Saul to the 
Hebrews as their King — The Search for the Asses — Saul Prophesies — Becomes 
another Man — His Fall — Obedience better than Sacrifice — Fear and Jealousy 
of David — An Evil Spirit from the Lord — Moral guilt or Madness? — Glimpses 
of Light — Resorting to the Witch — His Death — David’s Elegy 237 


XVIII. 

JONATHAN. 

THE UNSELFISH FRIEND. 

Oldest Son of Saul — Name equivalent to Theodore — His Bow — Saul’s Constant 
Companion — A Glimpse of some Dark History — War with the Philistines — 
Jonathan and his Armor-bearer — Ascent of the Cliff — Panic — Tasting the 
Honey — A wild Revel — Romantic Friendship of David and Jonathan — 
Pathos of the Narrative — Character of Jonathan — Fondness for Archery — 
Minor Traits — Parting of the Friends — Dies with his Father in Battle 253 


XIX. 

DAVID. 

THE ROYAL PSALMIST. 

Diverse Opinions of David — Neither a Monster nor a Deity — Views of ITazlitt and 
of Edward Irving — The Shepherd Boy — Bunyan’s Pastoral — Slaying the 
Lion and the Bear — The Giant and the smooth Sling-stone — The Cave of 
Adullam — Reaches the Throne — His Fall — Passion, Poetry and Faith — His 
Character Checkered — Establishes the Monarchy — His Martial Spirit, Accom- 
plishments and Genius — Strong Affections — The Psalter — David’s Harp — A 
Bible within a Bible — Testimony of Augustine — Of Chrysostom, Melanchthon, 
Locke and Luther — The Psalmist the Mouthpiece of the Individual Soul — 
Naturalness and Joyousness of the Psalms — Lament over Absalom 259 


CONTENTS. 


0 


XX. 

JOAB. 

THE CAPTAIN OF THE HOST. 

PAGE 

Oldest of David’s Nephews — Brought up with him as a Brother — Fills the second 
Place in the History of David’s Reign — Abner’s Challenge — Fight of the 
Twenty-four Champions — The Killing of Asahel — Murder of Abner — Anger 
of David — Siege of Jebus — Becomes Commander-in-Chief — Founder of the 
Jewish Empire — Campaigns and Battles — Addressed as “Lord” — Splendid 
Country-seat — War against Ammon — Sacrifices Uriah at the desire of David — 
Reinstates Absalom in the King’s Favor — Stands by David in Absalom’s Re- 
volt — Kills the Traitor — Relieved from Command, and the Rebel Amasa put 
in his Place — Kills Amasa — Crushes the Rebellion — Opposes the Census — 
Favors the Succession of Adonijah to the Throne — David commands Solomon 
to kill him — The Veteran Slaughtered with his Hands on the Altar.. 270 


XXL 

SOLOMON. 

THE WISE MONARCH. 

Magnificence of his Reign — Even his Sins on a large Scale — His Sufferings Co- 
lossal — Pomp of his Establishment — Splendor of his House and Temple — 
Widespread Commerce — His Wisdom greater than his Strength — Proved that 
Peace has greater Triumphs than War — Framed a Rude Science — His Hour 
and Power of Darkness — Sin begotten of Luxury — Suffering following in the 
Track of Sin — The Pinnacle overhangs the Precipice — Majestic in his Ruins — 

A Mysterious Envy in the Universe — A Didactic and Descriptive Poet — His 
Fire calm and glowing — Still, Rich Pictures — Contrast with David — The Poet- 
age of Israel — His Imagination and Intellect equal — The Proverbs collected 
and Enlarged by him — Praise and Personification of Wisdom — Ecclesiastes 
a Spiritual Biography — Compared with those of Bunyan and Carlyle — Solo- 
mon’s Song — Suffused with a Rich Light — Not Oriental Climate and Genius 
Alone — The Rose of Sharon — Beautiful Descriptions of Nature — Shake- 
speare — Letters of Rutherford — The Glory of Solomon 277 


XXII. 

ELIJAH. 

THE PROPHET OF FIRE. 

Jezebel — Ahab a Tool in her Hands — Athaliah — Phoenician Worship in Ahab’s 
Court — The First Great Persecution — Hiding in Caverns — Appearance of 
Elijah — Contrast with other Prophets — A Gileadite — His Shaggy Hair and 
Sheepskin — Flight from Jezebel — Jonah his Companion — Vision at IIo- 
reb — The Hurricane — The Earthquake — The Still, Small Voice — A Special 


30 


CONTENTS. 


PAGE 


Message to Elijah — A Universal Message to the Church — A Revelation con- 
cerning God — The Gospel of Elijah — Naboth’s Vineyard — Ahab’s Despondency 
— Jezebel’s Pledge — Lady Macbeth — Naboth and his Sons stoned to Death — 
Ahab takes possession of the Garden — Confronted by Elijah — His Doom Pro- 
nounced — Ramoth-Gilead — The King receives his Death Wound — Dogs lap 
up his Blood — The Heights of Carmel — The Chariot of Fire — The Mount of 
Transfiguration 292 


XXIII. 

ELISHA. 

THE WORTHY SUCCESSOR. 

The Mantle thrown over him — Witnesses the Ascension of Elijah — Jericho — Its 
Historical Associations — Its Capture by the Israelites — Elisha makes his 
Residence here — Sweetening the Waters — The Cruse of Salt — Destruction of 
the Youth — The War with Moab — The Ditches filled with Water — Panic and 
Slaughter — A Poor Widow — The. Pot of Oil — The Woman of Shunem — Life 
from Death — Elisha at Gilgal — Death in the Pot — The Lost Hatchet — The 
Great Famine — The Land Restored — Elisha’s Death — A Corpse touches his 
Bones — Excellence of his Character 311 


XXIV. 

X A AM AN. 

THE LEPER. 

Israel Overrun by the Syrians — Capture of a Hebrew Maiden — Her Sympathy 
for her Master — His Resolve to visit Elisha — Hastens across Lebanon — 
Carries a Letter to Jehoram — Approaches Elisha’s Dwelling — The Prophet’s 
Command — Indignation of Naatnan — Remonstrance of his Servants — Les- 
sons of the Narrative — Naaman Washes, and is Cured — Is Converted from 
Idolatry — The Prophet refuses his Money — The two Requests of Naaman — 
Remark of Bishop Hall 333 


XXV. 

JEHU. 

THE ZEALOT. 

Ramoth-Gilead — The Council Interrupted — The Abrupt Message — Jehu 

Anointed — The Messenger Vanishes — The Army declares for Jehu — He takes 
his Cavalry and starts for the Capital — Wisdom and Energy — Furious Driv- 
ing — The Lightning Strikes before it Thunders — Death of the Two Kings — 
Tragic End of Jezebel — Seventy Sons of Ahab Murdered — Their Heads 
Piled at the Gate of Jezreel — Slaughter of Ahaziah’s Brothers — Massacre in 
the Temple of Baal — Jonadab, the Son of Rechab — The Zeal of Selfishness — 

Was Jehu a Good Man ? — Danger of Self-deception 345 


CONTENTS. 


11 


XXVI. 

JONAH. 

THE PROPHET OF REPENTANCE. 

PAOK 

Order of the Prophetic Books — Jonah thrice mentioned in Jewish Tradition — His 
Wondrous Story — Song of Deliverance — Incidents of the Narrative — Jonah 
Sunk in Sleep — The Great Fish — The Prophet enters Nineveh — Power of 
Units — Minorities — God spares the City — Anger of Jonah — The Booth — The 
Gourd — The Worm — “Better to Die than to Live” — Many have sat with Jo- 
nah — Lessons of the Story 362 


XXVII. 

UZZIAH. 

THE CONQUEROR. 

Ascends the Throne at Sixteen Years of Ago — Restores the Temple Worship — 
Fortifies Jerusalem — Encourages Agriculture — Splendid Army — Philistines 
Humbled — Arabians Defeated — Ammonites Pay Tribute — Great Plague of 
Locusts — Earthquake — Uzziah’s Sin — Awful Punishment — Shut up in the 
Public Infirmary — His Grave 371 


XXVIII. 

ISAIAH. 

THE GOSPEL' PROPHET. 

A Universal Teacher of Mankind — His Name a Household Word — A Statesman — 
Attached to the Court — His Simplicity — His Call — Vision in the Temple — 

The Flaming Altar — The Remnant — Sixty Years of Toil — Predictions of the 
Messiah — Ilis Task a Difficult One — His Name Significant — Often Cited in 
the New Testament — In Advance of his Age 375 


XXIX. 

HEZEKIAH. 

THE GOOD KING. 

A few Pious Sovereigns— A Happy Day when Hezekiah mounted the Throne — 
Influence of a Good Mother — Opening the Temple — A Letter from the King 
of Assyria — Hezekiah’s Faith — His Sickness — His Sin — His Prayer — 

His Death 3S2 


32 


CONTENTS. 


XXX. 

JOSIAH. 

THE ROYAL REFORMER. 

PAG* 

Began to Reign at Eight Years of Age — Did what was Right — Put Down Idola- 
try — Repaired the Temple — Book of the Law Discovered — Luther and the 
Reformation — Shaphan the Scribe — Iluldah the Prophetess — Covenanting 
with God — A Peaceful and Prosperous Reign 386 


XXXI. 

JEREMIAH. 

THE WEEPING PROPHET. 

Contrast with Isaiah — Pathos of Jeremiah — His Diffidence — Charge Committed 
to him — Unfriendliness of the People — Plots — Persecuted by the King and 
Court — Destruction of Jerusalem — Book of Lamentations — Alleviating Cir- 
cumstances — Favored at times by Zedekiah — Friendship of Ebed-Melech — 
Jeremiah Drawn out of the Dungeon — The Prophet Baruch — Kindred Tem- 
perament — Pitied by the Conquerors — His Courage — What a Prophet should 
Be 390 


XXXII. 

EZEKIEL. 

THE PROPHET OF THE CAPTIVITY. 

Who can Claim Kindred with Ezekiel? — Comparison of a Comet — Groundwork of 
his Prophecy — A Record of Trances — Gigantic Scenery — Four Living Crea- 
tures — Typical Acts — Ardent Temperament of the East — Boldness of Spirit — 
Elegant Beauty — Practical Appeals — The Watchman — A Poet’s Knowledge 
of Man — Priest as well as Prophet — Amplification — His History — Picture of 
the Prophet — Jewish Hymn in Babylon 398 


XXXIII. 

DANIEL. 

THE PROPHET AND PRIME MINISTER. 

Contrast with other Prophets — A Great Prince — What are Dreams ? — Daniel’s 
History — A Jewish Captive — Carried to Babylon — Educated in the Palace- 
Progress in Learning — Nebuchadnezzar’s Threats to his Wise Men — Daniel 
Prays and Interprets the Dream — Declares the Decree of Heaven to the 
King — Belshazzar — Handwriting on the Wall — Darius — Conspiracy against 
Daniel — The Three Hours of Prayer — The Lion’s Den — Delivered from 
Death — Chief Counselor of Cyrus — His Integrity — Rest and Joy in Heaven. 407 


CONTENTS. 


1 9 
lo 


XXXIV. 

ZECHARIAH. 

THE PROPHET OF THE RESTORATION. 

PAGE 

His Mission — Idolatry at an End among the Jews — Promises of Messiah — Book 
Divided into Two Parts — Restoring the Temple — The Samaritans — Heat of 
Religious Dissension — First Series of Predictions — Man upon the Red Horse — 
Advantages of Age — Zeehariah’s Later Prophecies — Ungodliness of the 
Priests — Ruin of the Temple and City foretold — Dispersion of the Jews — Con- 
version of the Nations — Everything to be Sanctified by Religion — New Heav- 
ens and a New Earth 416 


XXXV. 

EZRA. 


THE SCRIBE. 

Crossing the Desert — Arrival at Jerusalem — Marriages with the Heathen — Editing 
the Scriptures — Expounding the Law — The Chaldee Alphabet — Synagogue 
Worship — The System of Traditions — Mishna and Gemara 423 


XXXVI. 

NEHEMIAH. 

THE CUPBEARER. 

The Walls of Jerusalem in Ruins — Preservation of the Jews Important to the 
Human Race — The King of Persia’s Cupbearer — The Gorgeous Palace of 
Shushan — Couches of Ivory — Sparkling Fountains — Nehemiah’s Piety — 
Prayer for Direction — Success — Good Thomas Fuller — The Preliminary Meas- 
ures to the Building of the Wall — The Persons Employed in this Work — The 
Opposition Encountered — The Spirit and Means by which the Work was 
Carried on — Subdivision of Labor — Strength Derived from the Consciousness 
of God’s Presence and Aid 426 


XXXVII. 

SIMEOX. 

. THE WAITING SAINT. 

False Gospels — Luke’s Bold Outlines — A Just and Devout Man — Expectation of 
Christ’s Appearance — The Presentation in the Temple — Simeon’s Recognition 
of the Infant Redeemer — The Swan-song of the Seer of the Old Covenant — 

A Light to Lighten the Gentiles — Prophecies of Simeon — “Waiting for the 
Consolation ” 456 


CONTENTS. 


14 


XXXVIII. 

JOHN. 

THE BAPTIST. 

PAG* 

Who are " Great Men ”? — Various Answers to the Question — Men not Great by 
Social Rank, Vast Wealth or Noble Descent-^Not Great Merely by Intellect- 
ual Gifts or the Possession of Power — Virtue Combined with Genius and 
Goodness with Power — True Greatness consists in Superior Mental and Moral 
Endowments — John was “Great in the Sight of the Lord” — His Familiarity 
with Nature — Converse with God — Distinguished Moral Excellences — Grand- 
eur and Beauty of his Character as a Man of God — The Self-denial of the 
Widow more Attractive to Christ than the Architecture of the Temple — John’s 
Moral Integrity Tested — His Work Demanded Intrepidity — His Humility — 
Faith — The First to Identify the Messiah — The Greatly Good — The Possession 
of Godlike Qualities 466 


XXXIX. 

PETER. 

THE ROCK. 

The Galilean Apostle — Burning Zeal of Peter — The Embattled Powers of Evil 
driven Back — Awful Judgment upon Falsehood — Divine Sanction of Benefi- 
cence — The First to receive the Dispensation of the Spirit — The Beautiful Gate 
of the Temple — The Fulfillment of the Ancient Law — The Gates of Heaven 
thrown open to the Human Race — Peter the First Human Founder of the 
Christian Faith 480 


XL. 

JOHN. 

THE BELOVED DISCIPLE. 

Surrounded by a Religious Atmosphere — Contemplative — The Companion of the 
Lord — Gentle yet Impetuous — Awful Calamities — The Rock of Patmos — Love 
Pervades the Teachings of John — While every Faculty Declines, this Ele- 
ment of his Character Burns more Brightly — Ecclesiastical Tradition — Little 
Children, Love one Another — The Sunset of the Apostolic Age 488 


XLI. 

JAMES. 

THE PRACTICAL PREACHER. 


Character of James to be Learned from his Epistle — Moderator of the Council of 
Jerusalem — His Common Sense — Enforcement of Moral Duties — His Earnest- 


CONTENTS. 


15 

pag a 

ness— Striking Imagery— Invective— The Law in Powder — 1 u Faith without 
Works is Dead”— The “ Great Teacher” in Earnest— The Demand of James 
is “Life, Fruit” — Tears away “Shams” — His First and Only Title 492 


XLII. 

STEPHEN. 

THE FIRST CHRISTIAN MARTYR. 

Full of Faith and of the Holy Ghost — Grace made him what he was — Knew whom 
he believed — One of the Seven Deacons — His Life Blameless— A Zealous La- 
borer for Christ — Marked by the Jews — Accused of Blasphemy — His De- 
fence — His Glorious End 496 


XLIII. 

PAUL. 

THE APOSTLE OF THE GENTILES. 

His Enthusiasm as a Jew — His Grecian Culture — Union of the Qualities of the 
East and of the West — Versatility of Nature — The Question of his Day — Ad- 
mission of the Gentiles into the Christian Church — This the Key to his 
Writings — Damascus — Antioch — The Jewish Sorcerer — The Lame Man 
cured — Mission to Jerusalem — Peter and Paul in Collision — Personal Appear- 
ance of the two Great Apostles — Quarrel with Barnabas about Mark — “ Prin- 
ciple ” in Church Fights — Placing certain Writers and Passages of the Bible 
above Others — Paul’s Abundant Labors — Visits Cilicia — The Galatians — The 
Macedonian Cry — First Gospel-Campaign in Europe — The Philippian 
Jailor — Berea — Paul at Athens — Speaks in the Jewish Synagogue, in the 
Market-place and on Mars’ Hill — Corinth — Third Missionary Tour — Paul in 
Palestine — Appeals to Caesar — Voyage to Italy — Preaches in Rome — Set 
Free — Labors in Spain and Elsewhere — Hurried again to Rome — His Death — 

“At Caesar’s Bar” 500 


XLIV. 

BARNABAS. 

THE GENEROUS FRIEND. 

A Man worth Imitating — A Good Representative of Personal Friendship — The 
Son of Consolation — His Generosity — Illustration from Houses in the East 
and in the West — Prompt Action — Introduces Paul to the Christian Church 
in Jerusalem — Misunderstandings — Blessed are the Peacemakers — Fable of 
the Wind and the Sun — Barnabas goes to Tarsus for Paul — Paul in the Shade 
at this Time — Magnanimity of Barnabas — Bishop of the Church at Milan 527 

2 


10 


CONTEXTS. 


XLV. 

APOLLOS. 

THE ELOQUENT ORATOR. 

PAG« 

The Associations of his Youth — Alexandria — The Resort of the Learned — A Place 
of High Culture — Apollos Mighty in the Scriptures — Elementary Knowledge 
of Christianity — Eloquent — Of Warm Temperament — Ilis Accuracy — Aquila 
and Priscilla — Humble Teachers — Men Prepared for their Work by Various 
Influences — A Letter of Commendation — First Epistle to the Corinthians — 
Divisions in the Church — Not the Fault of Apollos — Paul’s Allusion to him — 

A Good Pattern for our Imitation — Many Lessons to be Learned from his 
Life 5 36 


XLVI. 

TIMOTHY. 

THE YOUNG DISCIPLE. 

The Last Panel in our Gallery of Portraits — Timothy’s Mother — His Early Train- 
ing — Biblical Instruction — Paul’s “ Son in the Faith ” — His Devotion — Active 
Employment in Missionary Work — Travels with Paul — Joins the Apostle at 
Rome — Paul’s Confidence in Timothy — Details showing their Intimate 
Friendship 547 


LIST OF STEEL ENGRAVINGS. 


Frontispiece, 

Joseph before Pharaoh, 

Face 

page 92, 

. . . . Meeting of Isaac and Rebecca. 


<« 

2 59 > 

David. 

<< 

u 

2 77 > 

. . . . Solomon. 

u 

(< 

375 > 

Isaiah. 

(( 

u 

398 , 

Ezekiel. 

■u 

(( 

466, 

. .... John the Baptist. 

li 

ii 

480, 

Peter. 

u 

u 

488, 

John the Evangelist. 

<t 

it 

496, 

. . Stephen. 

u 

<t 

0 

0 

. . . . * Paul. 

« 

(( 

5 2 7 > 

. . . . . . Barnabas. 









INTRODUCTION. 


T HE title chosen for this book is a happy one — “The Great 
Men of God/’ — great men in the judgment and estimation, 
of God, or great men in and through the power of God, or yet 
again, men great in godliness. There are many kinds of great- 
ness recognized in the world among men — great conquerors, great 
rulers, great statesmen, great scholars, and great benefactors. 
And the world does well to hold such in remembrance, and to pre- 
serve their lives for the example and inspiration of others. But 
the world’s great men may or may not be great men of God. To 
be great toward God, or great in godliness, is the highest order 
of greatness, and to be entitled to rank in this high order requires 
certain indispensable traits of character. A great conqueror whose 
fame may fill the world, may after all be only a great destroyer. 
A great statesman, winning the applause of nations by his wisdom 
and forethought, may be but an ambitious aspirant after place and 
power. A great scholar may be only a mere selfish plodder in 
books, and seeker after knowledge for his own gratification and 
pleasure. A hero whose martial deeds may attract the admiration 
of the world may be only a daring, reckless adventurer, sustained 
by no true courage, and inspired by no noble motives. Back of 
all outward manifestations and action lie the true elements of 
character, and the real requisites of true greatness. These must 
be sought in the motives, the inspiration, and the purposes of the 
life. Among even the world’s truly great men must be found 
purity of motive, a lofty, manly inspiration, and a broad, generous, 
unselfish purpose ; otherwise, even in the world’s estimation, their 
fame is but sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. Much more, in 
“ great men of God ” shall we find these elements of character 
combined with others still higher and greater. 

In God’s heroes, to human greatness must be added divine great- 
ness — greatness on the godward side of life. Accordingly in these 
great Bible characters, while we would recognize every one of 
them as great in his simple manhood, we discover still other more 


18 


INTRODUCTION. 


prominent elements of character which lift them into a higher 
and diviner sphere of manhood. They are great through God. 
They are great for the sake of God. They are great by the inspi- 
ration and help of God. Their lives are directed with reference 
to the will and purposes of God. They are consecrated lives. 
They are lives sanctified and animated by faith and obedience. 
And this faith in God and obedience to his will is their peculiar 
characteristic, and is what lifts them into their pre-eminence as 
great men of God. They may be great statesmen, as Moses and 
Samuel and David; or great heroes, as Joshua and Gideon and 
Samson ; or great in wisdom, as Solomon ; or great reformers, as 
Isaiah and Jeremiah and Daniel; but they are all great men of 
God through their faith and obedience to him, and the consecra- 
tion of their lives to his purposes. They are chosen instruments 
of God. And in this higher and broader greatness, they belong 
not merely to the Bible and the Jews, but to the race. 

As an illustration of this true greatness, was there ever more 
implicit obedience than that of Abraham’s? His early home was 
Ur of Chaldea, on the right bank of the Euphrates, near the an- 
cient head of the Persian Gulf. At the command of God he at 
once leaves his country and removes to Haran, where he pros- 
pers and accumulates property. In the midst of his prosperity 
and quiet rest the Lord again calls, and immediately he goes to a 
strange land, occupied by a hostile people, and this with no title 
or prospect but the promise of God, “ I will make of thee a great 
nation.” Yet upon that single warrant Abraham leaves country, 
kindred, home, every thing that attaches one to the place of his 
nativity, and went out, “not knowing whither he went.” When 
prosperity had again crowned his new home and labors, and the 
“ child of promise ” had come, and was growing up to manhood, 
again the command of his God came to him in a form sufficient 
to shake the foundation of the strongest faith, and to arouse re- 
bellion in the most, obedient spirit: “Take now thy son, thine 
only son Isaac, whom thou lovest , and get thee into the land of 
Moriah, and offer him there for a burnt-offering ! ” Terrible as 
was the command, the faith and obedience stood the test, and 
Abraham immediately obeyed, “ and went unto the place of which 
God had told him.” Thus faith in God directed him in the whole 
course of his life. He planned nothing of himself, nothing for 


INTRODUCTION. 


19 


himself. Following the leadings of divine Providence with the 
one supreme motive to honor and obey God, he carried with him 
the presence of the Lord, and wherever he fixed his abode 
he consecrated it with God’s altar. Well may such a man be 
recognized as a “ Great Man of God,” and be called the “ friend 
of God,” and the “father of the faithful.” 

Again, how beautiful and how great a life on its mere human 
side was that of Joseph — so beautiful that an attempt has been 
made to dramatize it, and to produce it on the stage, with the 
accessories of scenery and music. And yet so grand is it on its 
godward side, that to portray it, to expand it, even to comment 
upon it, is to take away its charm. It is a life lived toward God 
and directed of God. Hence we see magnanimity triumphing 
over meanness ; generosity requiting envy and malice ; the man 
who had become so great in wisdom and power showing himself 
greater still in humility and love ; but above all we see the spirit 
of piety honoring God in all the events of life, and dictating for- 
giveness toward men for injuries which God had turned to bless- 
ings. Up to the time of his sudden exaltation, each particular 
event of his life had seemed to tell against him, every body was 
his enemy ; and yet all things were working together for his good ! 
Who would not trust and magnify the Lord who holds all the 
complicated threads of life in the guiding hand of love ? And 
who does not see at a glance wherein lay the great strength of 
Joseph ! 

As a still further illustration let us take one of the prophets. 
Dean Stanley has pronounced Elijah the Tishbite, “ the grandest 
and most romantic character that Israel produced.” His was in- 
deed a rugged and stormy life, and his name is worthy to be asso- 
ciated with that of Moses — the representative of the prophets, as 
Moses was of the law, and both to bring the grandeur and glory 
of the Old Testament and lay them at the feet of Jesus as the 
homage of God’s greatest men paid on the mount of transfigura- 
tion to the supreme man. Not Cesar surpassed this old prophet 
in courage; not Luther or John Knox was bolder than he. His 
whole history is made up of a succession of great, striking pictures 
even to the last. The chariot of fire and the horses of flame seem 
to be but the natural close of the wonderful life. Independent of 
his greatness as an inspired prophet, we can see that there is a 


20 


INTRODUCTION. 


native grandeur about the man, that his is a colossal nature. Fear- 
less, independent, he towers above kings and princes ; while next 
to his loyalty to God, is his true, devoted love to his country, his 
firm, unsullied patriotism. And yet, apart from his prophetic 
character, what is Elijah but a man of grand and noble nature, 
lifted up into a divine hero by his unflinching faith in God, and 
his implicit obedience to his will and purposes ! 

In almost every nation there arise at long intervals remarkable 
men, whose lives, characters, or teachings, effect great revolutions 
in its political or religious life. Such men stand as columns to 
mark the dividing line, or the epochs, in human history Such in 
ancient Greece were Socrates and Plato ; such in China were 
Confucius and Mencius ; such of another character were Alexan- 
der, Cesar, Charlemagne ; and in more modern times such were 
Cromwell, Bonaparte, and Washington. But wonderful as these 
men were in the greatness of their genius, the grandeur of their 
achievements, and the social and political changes they produced, 
they differ immensely and in the most important respects from 
these “ great men of God.” Alexander had his strong cohorts 
behind him, Cesar his mighty legions, Bonaparte his heroic col- 
umns, and even Washington his enthusiastic and admiring coun- 
trymen, consecrated with himself to the achievement of a grand 
purpose. But many of these heroes of God were alone and sin- 
gle handed, and yet wrought greater revolutions, and effected 
wider and more permanent changes, than they all. Paul was a 
hero of the grandest type, a model hero, though his transcendent 
courage was never exhibited on the field of battle. Those great 
men of the world attract our attention by their conquering arms, 
or by the productions of their genius; but these men of God often 
attract our attention and claim our admiration from the very fact 
that they are not surrounded by the accessories of outward pomp 
and grandeur, or the glamour of the schools of learning and phi- 
losophy, and yet their achievements surpass those of the great 
men and martial heroes of the world. They surpass them also in 
the heroic qualities which they exhibit. They face death, not 
occasionally, but constantly without flinching ; not amid the ex- 
citement of battle and the shouts of men, but often alone and 
unfriended; not surrounded by the presence and sympathy of 
admiring thousands, but surrounded with enemies and over- 


INTRODUCTION. 


21 


whelmed with taunts and jibes, and covered with disgrace. 
Where the courage of the boldest fails, theirs, indeed, seems to 
take a loftier bearing. History is full, indeed, of heroes of many 
kinds, but no book so abounds with them as the Bible, nor do 
they anywhere else assume so lofty and so sacred a type. Among 
these it is the heroism of piety, of faith, of obedience; in the 
world it is often only the heroism of reckless daring, or of bound- 
less ambition. The world’s heroes conquer cities, but God’s- 
great men conquer themselves. 

We do not mean that all, or even any, of these great characters 
of the Bible are perfect men. They are human like ourselves ; 
they are, indeed, only men of like passions with ourselves, raised 
into a high sphere of excellence by the power of faith and obedi- 
ence toward God. And nothing is more striking than the honesty 
of the Bible in narrating, without extenuation, the failings and sins 
of God’s own people. It is a token both of the historic truth and 
the divine wisdom of the record. The lives of these men of God 
are presented to us as human lives unfolding, growing, and matur- 
ing in grace and goodness, under the leadings of a divine Provi- 
dence and the sanctifying power of the divine Spirit. The fact 
that God uses imperfect men, and even sometimes turns their 
mistakes and wrong doings to the furtherance of his own plans, is 
never used to justify, or even to palliate, their errors or sins. 
Though subsequently a Solomon may be born of Bathsheba, and 
become the glorious successor of David, yet the adultery is not 
forgotten or condoned, but is severely condemned and punished. 
The wicked fraud of Rebekah and Jacob in the imposition on 
Isaac is narrated, but both are condemned, and bring upon them- 
selves serious punishment ; strife and bitterness were brought into 
the household, and sorrow fell upon herself and her son. To her 
unhappiness arising from the absence of her favorite son, to him 
banishment from his home and mother, were the consequences of 
their mutual deception and fraud. Among God’s great men is 
Gideon, the type of moral courage and of unambitious and unself- 
ish heroism ; but there is also Samson, the hero of physical strength. 
But Samson is not held forth as a model, but as a warning ; 
showing how extraordinary gifts from God may be abused by 
strong sensual passions ; and the greatest hero, by dallying in the 
lap of pleasure, may be shorn of his strength and lenown. 


22 


INTRODUCTION. 


We are, indeed, too apt, while wondering at the greatness of 
character and the lofty heroism of the characters described and 
eulogized by the pen of the sacred historian, to forget that, after 
all, these were but men, and to ascribe their superior character 
and greatness entirely to miraculous power — a divinely imparted 
quality — as if the man was a mere passive instrument that could 
act no otherwise than he did. This would be to lift them out of 
the sphere of our sympathy, and place them beyond all power of 
influence and inspiration as examples for us. We must not forget 
that they were like ourselves, with the same hopes and fears, the 
same dread of suffering, and the same- shrinking from danger and 
from incurring vast responsibilities. Nor should we forget that, 
though God often chooses “ the weak things of the world to con- 
found the things which are mighty,” yet for great deeds he selects 
great souls. God’s methods with men in the olden time do not differ 
in kind from his methods with us in our own day. He chose his 
instruments ; they were men ; by his providence and grace he made 
them such instruments as he could use, but still left them men. 
But though he found it necessary, in the early, half-barbarous age 
of the world to bring about events by miraculous interposition 
and miraculous influences upon men, yet neither the instruments 
themselves nor the designs differ in any way from those we now 
behold. Whether the instrument be Moses, or David, or Isaiah, or 
Augustine, or Luther, or Wesley, it is God working out his plans 
through great men. The former are just as much men in human 
history as the latter, although we are inclined to look upon them 
simply as inspired and miraculous characters. The only differ- 
ence in them is, that the former perform their great deeds under 
the explicit and direct direction of God, and the latter theirs un- 
der the guidance of his providence and the leadings of his Spirit. 
Hence the humanity of these instruments of God is as evident 
in their lives as is the miraculous and divine which leads and as- 
sists them in their great deeds and lives. 

The individuality of these men is apparent to us ; their pecul- 
iar traits of character, their dispositions, their culture, are visible 
in all their works. Indeed, mcst of them seem to have been 
chosen for their peculiar work from the very adaptedness of their 
peculiar character for the special work and mission to which 
they were called. They impress us at once as the right men in 


INTRODUCTION. 


23 


the right places. Moses and Isaiah, Abraham and David, could 
not change places. As far as we are acquainted with the charac- 
ters of the apostles, they seem to have been chosen of Christ as 
representative men ; that is, men representing certain great dis- 
tinct classes, each marked by strong characteristics. “John,” 
says Dr. Schaff, “ is unquestionably one of those highly-gifted 
natures, endued with a delicate, contemplative mind, lively feel- 
ing, glowing imagination, and tender, loving heart. He knew 
how to communicate in the most simple, childlike dress the pro- 
foundest truths which furnish the maturest thinkers inexhaustible 
materials for study.” James, the brother of our Lord, is of that 
large conservative class who, when they accept the new, do not 
wholly relinquish the old. Calm, prudent, and conciliatory, he 
labors more to harmonize and consolidate than to make aggres- 
sions. Peter, a man of intense feelings and affections, represents 
those bold, impulsive characters of great energy and practicality, 
who would be leaders in whatever circumstances they might be 
thrown. Thomas is a natural skeptic, who believes nothing ex- 
cept on the most undoubted testimony, and must be not only an 
eye-witness of marvels, but must test them before he accepts 
them, anticipating the scientific skeptic of even the nineteenth 
century. Paul is conscientious, thoughtful, rational, argumenta- 
tive. Each of these God uses in his own place, and in accord- 
ance with his own character and capabilities. We thereby re- 
ceive from them the complete and many-sided presentation of 
Christianity. 

The heroes and martyrs of the Bible, then, were men with the 
same hopes and fears and emotions that belong to men of every 
age, and it was designed that they should awaken in us the same 
personal interest and sympathy. Simply as men, they are entitled 
to as high a place on the scroll of fame as the heroes of any other 
age or nation ; and as the moral heroes of the race, whose passage 
through life has cast one broad beam of light over the earth, they 
deserve a far higher place in history and are worthy of immortal 
praise. In the Bible the lives of these great men are fragmentary 
and scattered, the narrative being interrupted by various events 
occurring at the same time but with which they had no immedi- 
ate connection. It is the work of the sacred biographer to select 
out of the mass of sacred history every thing of interest belonging 


24 


INTRODUCTION. 


to each individual, either directly stated or referred to, and bring 
them into a connected narrative. The Bible is the great, and in 
one sense the only, source of information. Still, the increasing 
knowledge of ancient customs, geography, and languages, and po- 
etry, and the further light obtained from contemporaneous history, 
enable the writer to discover new points of interest, and to bring 
out into bolder relief the individual traits and actions of these 
great men. Such has been the course pursued by the eminent 
men who have sketched the lives contained in this volume. Such 
names as Dr. Guthrie, Dean Stanley, and Bishop Oxenden are a 
sufficient guarantee that the work has been done faithfully and 
eloquently. 

Doubtless the great object of sacred biography is to set before 
us the lives of God’s saints as examples and inspiration for our 
own. “ All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profit- 
able for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in 
righteousness;” but no part of it more so than the lives of the 
grand saints of old. “While I mused,” says one of them, “the 
fire burned ; ” and it is not in the nature of things for a Christian 
man to sit down to his Bible, and turn to the history of its saints, 
and hold communion with them, without imbibing somewhat of 
their spirit. As he muses on their virtues and piety he will feel, 
in holy desires, the fires that glowed in their bosoms kindling and 
burning in his own. In the faith of Abraham and the chastity of 
Joseph, the meekness of Moses and the patience of Job, the piety 
of David and the fidelity of Daniel, in the zeal of Paul and the 
love of John, we see what attainments others have reached, to 
what height of grace we ourselves may aspire. We cannot con- 
template such characters without admiring them, nor can we long 
admire without desiring to resemble them. Nor need we fear to 
aspire so high. The course to which God calls the humblest 
Christian is one grander than they attained. Should we reach 
their height, far above us as they now seem, we shall not yet have 
attained, nor be already perfect. Far above them all stands 
Jesus, the perfect example, calling to us still, “ Come ye up hither.” 
So, then, “ leaving Abraham binding his son on the altar; Job sit- 
ting amid the ruins of all his fortune and the graves of all his chil- 
dren, bowing submissively to God; David descending from a 
throne to tune his harp and fill a royal palace with sacred melo- 


INTRODUCTION. 


25 


dies; Daniel on his knees, with a window thrown open to Jerusa- 
lem, within eyesight of malignant spies and earshot of the lions 
ravening for their prey; Elijah on Mouirt Carmel, with his back 
to the altar of God and his face to a hostile world, 1 among the 
faithless faithful only he,’ leaving these grand spectacles below, 
let us still look unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.” 
Forgetting the things which are behind, let us press forward to 
the mark of the prize of our high calling in Jesus Christ. The 
goal is this : “ Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father 

which is in heaven is perfect.” 

The real secret of these great lives is their consecration to the 
will and purposes of God. They are consciously under his protec- 
tion and guidance. They are supported by their abiding trust in 
his providence. Their prosperity, they feel, comes from him, and 
in adversity they are confident that he has not forsaken them. 
They move forward in the unfailing faith that their lives are or- 
dered of God. Hence they are strong, faithful, heroic, and patient. 
So we may feel that God has a plan concerning every one of us. 
Our lives do not move on at haphazard, neither are they alto- 
gether shaped by our own choice ; but the Lord had a purpose in 
bringing us into being, and is directing our lives toward the fulfill- 
ment of that purpose. His purpose toward his people is always 
good. We can, indeed, frustrate the moral end of our creation, by 
our perversity and our sin; but if we adapt ourselves in submis- 
sion and obedience to the will of God, he will perfect that which 
concerns us. He will not abandon his own plan. It matters 
not that he is so great and high and we so insignificant. He who 
clothes the lilies and feeds the birds of the air, and watches over 
the minutest laws and processes of the physical universe, thinks 
upon his children with a father’s watchful and forecasting love. 
When we find ourselves in trouble we may not infer God has for- 
saken or forgotten us. Our path may lie through the sea; but he 
will make the waters as a wall upon the right hand and the left. 
Our way may lead through the valley of the shadow of death ; but 
he will go with us ; his rod and staff will comfort us. The very 
trials of life, disciplining our hearts to a loftier faith, separating us 
from a worldly into a spiritual life, may be a means of perfecting 
that which concerneth us in the wise and holy purpose of God. 

These great men of God are our examples, our forerunners in 


26 


INTRODUCTION. 


the ways of God, and in the paths of our struggling human life. 
When one must endure a trial it is comforting to know that a 
friend has borne the same and come forth victorious. When one 
must face a danger, it is encouraging to think upon another who 
has gone through it unscathed. Though the stream is high, 
and the night is dark and boisterous, we can venture upon the 
bridge over which others have passed in safety. As we enter into 
the trials and conflicts which we as followers of God must endure, 
how inspiring and strengthening to turn the eye toward these 
“great men of God,” this great cloud of witnesses who compass 
us about, and who have triumphed in the power of God, and above 
them all to hear the voice of Jesus saying to us: “Be of good 
cheer; I have overcome the world.” 

What history can show a line of heroes and martyrs to be com- 
pared to these witnesses for God and truth ? What line of truth 
has had an attestation so courageous, so persistent, so triumphant? 
These heroes have been witnesses and martyrs — not for something 
objective and tangible, not for a visible and earthly kingdom with 
its thrones and promises — their sustaining motive was a subjective 
faith : faith in God, in an invisible person ; faith in realities that 
were not seen, in promises that were not yet fulfilled ; in a country, 
a kingdom, in the far distant future. Nothing personal prompted 
this faith and devotion ; nothing selfish nurtured these hopes. So 
far as this world is concerned, most of these men of God had every 
thing to lose : their reward and hopes were in the future. They 
anticipated us ; they paved the w r ay for us in tears and blood, 
awaiting our perfecting for the fruition of their hope. Let us en- 
ter manfully into their labors, that we may come at length into 
their rest and reward. I. W. Wiley. 

Boston, September 13, 1875. 



Great Men of God. 


i. 

ADAM. 

OD had framed and fitted lip this vast fabric, this 
magnificent palace, the earth, worthy of the inhabitant 
whom he designed to occupy it, and worthy of himself. 
He had created, suspended and balanced the greater and 
the lesser lights, and settled the economy of the whole host of 
heaven. And then, in condescension to human feebleness of 
thought, he is represented as counseling and deliberating, and 
so designs and produces Adam:, the first of men. 

When the earth is to be fashioned and the ocean to be poured 
into its appointed bed, when the firmament is to be expanded 
and suns to be lighted up, God says, Let them he! and they are 
created. But when man is to be made, the creating Power seems 
to make a solemn pause, retires within himself, looks for a model 
by which to frame this exquisite piece of workmanship, and finds 
it in himself: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, 
after our likeness ; and let them have dominion over the fish of 
the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and 
over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth 



28 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the 
image of God created he him, male and female created he them.” 

And oh how fair must that form have been which the finger of 
God framed without the intervention of a second cause ! How 
capacious that soul which the breath of God immediately inspired ! 
Behold “ our first father” taking possession of his fair inheritance, 
his vast empire, in all the majesty of unclouded reason and all 
the beauty of perfect innocence ; possessed of every bodily and 
every mental endowment ; placed in the garden of Eden to dress 
and to keep it ; entering on his employment with alacrity and 
joy, and surveying his ample portion with complacency and de- 
light. The prosecution of his pleasant task unfolds to him still 
new wonders of divine power and skill. The flower and the 
shrub and the tree disclose their virtues, uses and ends to his 
observing eye. Every beast of the field spontaneously ministers 
to his pleasure or his advantage ; all the host of heaven stands 
revealed to his capacious soul, and God himself, the Lord of all, 
delights in him, and converses with him as a father and a friend. 

The naming of the animals is a point of special interest in the 
sacred narrative. Before Adam all his vassals of the brute crea- 
tion appear, and at one glance he discovers their nature and 
qualities and gives them suitable names. And this act indicates 
command. It is the exercise of the power delegated before in the 
words : “ Have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the 
fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon 
the earth.” This dominion is referred to in other parts of the 
Scriptures as if it was a favorite thought. And, indeed, the sway 
that man exerts over all his fellow-tenants of the globe is among 
the most remarkable things in his history. How wonderfully 
they are all made to serve him for food or raiment, for his need 
or convenience or luxury ! The strongest and the wildest are 
subdued to his use. He outwits the craftiest. He outstrips or 
tires down the fleetest. The huge elephant of the torrid zone, 
who could trample out his life and scarcely feel that anything was 


ADAM. 


29 


under his foot, or toss him into the air like a ball with his snaky 
hand, stoops down to receive his weight or marches to aid him 
in his battles. The huger whale of the polar seas is compelled 
to furnish light for his dwelling. The bear is pursued over the 
ice to supply warmth for his limbs. He reaches fish at the bot- 
tom of the water, and brings down the birds from their flight in 
the sky. The tiger of the Indian jungle has been known to 
quail before the determination of his eye, and the lion and the 
panther are trained to leap over his arm as if they were spaniels. 
The worm and the bee bring their contributions to him, one 
spinning for his manufactories, and the other furnishing confec- 
tions for his table. Thus the small as well as the large sign them- 
selves his subjects. He is crowned with this glory and honor. 

Again, we have here exhibited in a figure the discerning mind 
of man, observing all the varieties and distinctions of things, and 
passing his decisions upon the universe. A single instance of 
this discrimination images all the rest. He who divides animate 
nature into its several kinds — and he must divide in order to 
denominate — extends the same intellectual operation to every- 
thing else. This leads to the classifying of whatever exists, 
whether actually present to the senses or shaped only by the 
inner faculties. And this is science. It is at least the origin and 
condition of all science. It was well fitted, therefore, to represent 
the inquisitive and apprehending spirit of man, ranging through 
the whole domain of things of which he is himself so small and 
transient a part, seeking everywhere to name and to know, divid- 
ing, collecting, generalizing, arranging the insects and mosses in 
ranks, and grouping the stars in constellations, and devising 
methods by which the most subtile operations of his own under- 
standing and the shadowy forms of his thought find their distinct 
provinces. He classes with as much ease the truths that are open 
only to his mental perception as he does the grossest substances. 
Not only does “ whatsoever passeth through the paths of the sea ” 
pass under the criticism of his research, but all that floats in the 


30 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


greater deeps of liis imagination, affection and conscience comes 
under the judgments of an inner sense, the highest that he pos- 
sesses. They all assume the respective titles that he assigns. 
They all obey the mysterious laws that rule over him and them. 

We have here implied the great faculty of speech which dis- 
tinguishes man from the creatures about him. They cannot speak 
to one another except in the inarticulate cries of nature, but he 
names them all through that varied utterance which the divine 
Spirit has breathed upon his lips. The gift of language is so 
kingly an endowment that he could have attained to none of his 
eminence without it. Speech is one of the leading points of his 
supremacy. But as yet he has none with wdiom he can hold com- 
munication. Name the beasts he may, but he cannot converse 
with them. He is alone, and therefore, even in Paradise, but 
half blessed. The rich profusion of Eden is but half relished 
and enjoyed, because there is none to partake of it with him. 
Being corporeal and earthly, he is unfit for the society of pure 
spirits ; being rational and divine, he is above the society of the 
most sagacious of the subject tribes. “For Adam,” in the wide 
extended creation, “ there was not found a help meet for him.” 
But no sooner is the want felt than it is supplied. God, who 
does nothing imperfectly, at length makes the happiness of Para- 
dise complete, and fills up the measure of Adam’s joy: “And 
the Lord caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept ; 
and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead 
thereof. And the rib which the Lord had taken from man, made 
he a woman, and brought her unto the man.” 

What an important era in the life of Adam ! What a new 
display of the Creator’s power and skill and goodness! How 
must the spirit of devotion be heightened, now that man could join 
in social worship ! What additional satisfaction in contemplating 
the frame, order and course of nature, now that he possessed the 
most exalted of human joys — that of conveying knowledge to a 
beloved object ! What a new flavor have the fruits which grow 


ADAM. 


31 


in the garden of God acquired, now that they are gathered by the 
hand of conjugal affection and recommended to the taste by the 
smile of complacency and love ! Our imagination cannot exceed 
the conception which the brief description of Scripture conveys of 
the joys of Paradise, the happiness of our first parents in their 
unfallen condition. They must have been perfect in body, beau- 
tiful of complexion, symmetrical of form, compact of structure, 
dignified of mien, and graceful of motion. No seed of weakness, 
or decay or pain lurked within them. Destined for immortality, 
they were instinct with a buoyancy that knew no depression, with 
a health that knew no change, and with a vigor and bloom that 
could never fade away. No fatigue distressed, no sickness visited 
them, no accident or calamity ever interfered with their free and 
unlimited enjoyments. Placed in a habitation worthy of their 
own dignity and of their Maker’s architecture, where the earth 
was clothed with beauty and the sky was overspread with mag- 
nificence, and where the sun and the moon and the stars displayed 
their greatest lustre and diffused their most benignant influence, 
they found every talent and every grace that each possessed, every 
personal endowment, every mental and spiritual ornament, every 
gift of heaven and earth, inexpressibly enhanced in value by the 
inseparable companionship of One who could sympathize in all 
their feelings, agree in all their views, take an interest in all their 
contemplations, reciprocate all their endearments, and participate 
in all their joys. Thus, in an atmosphere impregnated with life, 
amid streams which flowed in beauty, amid fruits that delighted 
the taste and flowers that charmed the eye and music that en- 
chanted the ear and scenes of countless attractions which gratified 
and satisfied every sense, they were appointed by a gracious Crea- 
tor to take up their peaceful dwelling-place, and to spend the days 
of their existence in the enjoyment of entire and unalloyed hap- 
piness. Oh blessed and glorious state ! — a morn without a cloud ! 
a sun without a spot ! a landscape without one drawback to di- 
minish its unequaled loveliness! Was bliss like this bestowed 


32 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


but to be blasted ? And must Adam’s chief felicity issue in his 
ruin? 

We are reluctantly brought forward to that awful revolution 
which at length took place in Adam’s condition and character. 
Of the duration of his innocence and happiness we have no ac- 
count. His history now becomes blended with that of the wicked 
and malignant spirit who had “left his first estate” of holiness 
and felicity, and who, having artfully seduced our first parents 
from their innocence, exposed them to the wrath of God, procured 
their expulsion from Paradise, rendered them a prey to fear, shame 
and remorse, and subjected them to pain, disease and death. 

The circumstances of the case, according to the Scripture ac- 
count of it, were these. The devil observes the serpent to be an 
animal of peculiar sagacity and penetration, and fixes on him as a 
fit instrument of seduction. Fearing a repulse from the superioi 
firmness and discernment of the man, he watches for, and finds, 
the unhappy moment when the woman, being separated from her 
husband, opposed to his wiles inferior powers of reason and intel- 
ligence with greater softness and pliancy. He addresses himself 
to a principle in her nature, the immoderate indulgence of which 
has proved fatal to so many thousands of her daughters — curiosity 
— curiosity, the investigator of truth, the mother of invention — 
curiosity, the prompter to rashness, the parent of danger, the 
guide to ruin. Having first gained her attention, he excites her 
to doubt and to reason in the face of a positive command, rouses 
in her a spirit of pride and ambition, and at length persuades her 
to make the fatal experiment. She eats of the prohibited tree, 
and by transgression acquires the knowledge of evil , whereas she 
had hitherto known only good. 

By what arguments Adam was prevailed upon to become a 
partner of her guilt we are not informed. From the apology he 
made for his conduct, it is to be inferred that female insinuation 
and address misled him from the law of his God. And thus were 
both ruined by the operation of principles in themselves good and 


ADAM. 


33 


useful, but carried to excess, unchecked by reason, unawed by re- 
ligion. Eve perished by a curious and ambitious desire after a 
condition for which God and Nature had not designed her — a 
desire to be “as God, to know good and evil;” Adam fell by 
complaisance to his wife, carried to unmanly weakness and com- 
pliance, yielding to his subject, bidding defiance to his sovereign. 

And what words can express, what heart can conceive, the 
bitter change? All his posterity have experienced the melan- 
choly transition from health to sickness, from ease to pain ; very 
many have passed from affluence to indigence, from glory to 
shame; and not a few have exchanged empire itself for banish- 
ment or a dungeon. But more than the accumulated weight of 
all these at once falls on the devoted head of our guilty first 
father. The eyes which before met the approach of God with 
rapture now are clouded with sorrow, tremble with fear, or 
strain with remorse and horror, at the voice of the Almighty. 
That tongue which was once tuned only to the accent and the 
language of love has in a moment learned to reproach and up- 
braid. The heart which glowed at the promise and the prospect 
of a fair, numerous, and happy progeny now sinks in dejection 
at the dismal apprehension of that guilt and woe in which his 
folly had plunged all his hapless children. Where innocence sat 
enthroned, there fell despair broods over her own stinging reflec- 
tions and tormenting fears. Above, the awful throne of an 
offended God ; beneath, a fathomless gulf, kindled by the breath 
of Jehovah as a stream of brimstone; within, a troubled con- 
science, like the raging sea, incapable of taking rest. “ The glory 
is departed : the gold is become dim, and the most fine gold 
changed.” 

And now, too, a revolution in outward circumstances takes 
place, corresponding to that which had passed on his internal 
constitution and character. Adam must no longer possess that 
paradise of which he had rendered himself unworthy. Justice 
drives out from Eden the man who had cast himself out from the 


3 


34 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


favor of God. A wall reaching up to heaven and immovable as 
the decree of the Eternal prevents the possibility of return. The 
flaming sword of the cherubim bars all access to the tree of life. 
His labor, formerly his delight, must henceforward be accom- 
panied with pain. The subject tribes throw off their allegiance, 
and either shun or threaten their lord. The elements change 
their influence, and the fair domain becomes a vast solitude. The 
sole partner of his former joys, now become the cause and the 
companion of his guilt, becomes also the companion of his woe. 
Sad reflections embitter and increase their common misery, 
and stern death stares them in the face. 

But “ will God contend for ever, will he be always wroth ?” 
Then “the spirit should fail before him, and the souls which he 
has made.” Behold, a dawn of hope arises, and the promise of 
the Most High saves from despair. The moment man becomes 
and feels himself a miserable offender, that moment is the gospel 
preached unto him; as the woman was first in the transgression, 
so from her the prospect of salvation arises ; and it is declared 
that “the old serpent, who is the devil and Satan,” who had, in 
deceiving her, destroyed her posterity, should, by one who was 
peculiarly her posterity, be destroyed and slain. Thus they leave 
Eden, supported and cheered with the expectation of triumph 
over their bitter enemy, and of being restored at length to the 
favor of their offended God. To keep alive this hope, as well as 
to afford present relief from shame, at this period, it would ap- 
pear, sacrifice was instituted. The same victim shed its blood, 
the type of atonement, and furnished its skin to clothe the 
naked, thereby presenting the emblem of a perfect righteousness, 
to cover and shelter the naked soul. And thus early, distinctly 
and unequivocally was Christianity taught to mankind. 

In process of time, however, Adam has the felicity of becoming 
a father, and enjoys the satisfaction of seeing the blessing pro- 
nounced upon him in his better state, notwithstanding his 
apostasy, taking effect. Eve becomes the joyful mother of two 


ADAM. 


35 


sons — Cain and Abel — and the earth begins to be replenished. 
Behold the first parents of mankind exulting in affections un- 
known, unfelt before — exulting in this fresh proof that God had 
not forgotten to be gracious. Behold the nuptial tie strengthened 
and confirmed, the voice of upbraiding and reproach turned to 
the language of gratulation, complacency, and love. 

Adam observes with growing delight his sons increasing in 
stature and wisdom. Stung with keen reflection upon the happi- 
ness which he had vilely thrown away, and the misery which he 
had entailed upon his hapless children, how would he exert him- 
self to repair that loss ! — how forcibly inculcate, by his own fatal 
example, the obligations of God’s holy law ! — with what gratitude 
lead them to the promised atonement ! — with what heartfelt de- 
light infuse knowledge into their opening minds! 

Man was destined to labor from the beginning, and for his 
punishment guilty man must labor with the sweat of his brow. 
But all the punishments of Heaven, in reality and in the issue, 
are blessings. It is the privilege and the happiness of Adam and 
all his sons to be employed, though to weariness and fatigue. 
Accordingly, the heirs and possessors of the whole globe, as soon 
as they arrive at man’s estate, betake themselves to the humble 
and necessary occupations of that simple state of human nature. 
“Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain was a tiller of the 
ground.” 

But Adam, we find, has taught his sons to blend religion with 
their secular employments — nay, to make their very employments 
the monitors and the means of religious worship. “ In process 
of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the 
ground an offering unto the Lord. And Abel he also brought 
of the firstlings of his flock, and of the fat thereof; and the Lord 
had respect to Abel and to his offering ; but unto Cain and his 
offering he had not respect.” Gen. iv. 3-5. And oh how early 
did the different passions and affections of the human mind dis- 
cover themselves ! Abel brings with his offering a humble, pious 


36 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


and believing spirit; Cain approaches the altar of God with a 
proud, selfish, wicked heart. And sad it is to observe, that 
the first disagreement in the world, the first human blood that 
was shed, arose from a religious cause, which is designed of God 
to be, and is in itself, the dearest bond of union among men. 

An event now took place in Adam’s family by which every 
former grief must have been renewed and embittered, and to his 
inexpressible mortification he finds himself a root of bitterness, 
of which all his branches must and do partake. Cain, incensed 
at the preference given to his brother’s offering, burning with 
envy and resentment, embraced his opportunity, and finding 
himself alone with him in the field, puts Abel to death. Thus man 
becomes the executioner of the dreadful sentence of the divine law 
upon man — brother upon brother. What must have been the 
emotions of Adam’s soul when this sad news was brought him ! 
— to lose a son, a pious, promising son, almost an only one, pre- 
maturely, unexpectedly, by the hand of his own brother! — the 
one dead, the other worse than dead — a wretch unworthy to live ! 
How would his own transgression again stare him in the face ! 
How would he again accuse himself as the author of his own 
wretchedness and the propagator of woe on woe to his posterity ! 
The empire of Satan over this miserable world would now seem 
confirmed, and the purpose of the divine grace would be appa- 
rently defeated. But God yet takes pity on fallen, guilty man, 
being mindful of his promise, and Seth is given to supply the loss 
of Abel — Seth, in whose line the promise runs, and of whom, as 
concerning the flesh, Christ should come. And thus the divine 
interpositions always seasonably and suitably meet our necessities 
and wants. 

Adam’s own forfeited life is prolonged to many generations, 
and he lives to see his posterity increased to a great multitude, 
inventing and cultivating the arts which support, adorn, or com- 
fort life. But the time approaches at last that he must die. 
Mercy flew as on the wings of a dove to his relief; justice walks 


ADAM. 


37 


with slow and steady steps to his punishment. By himself sin 
had entered into the world, and death must inevitably follow 
and pass upon him and upon all men. He had seen the ghastly 
appearance of death in the person of his murdered son ; he must 
now drink the bitter cup for himself : “ And the days that Adam 
lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died.” 

This is the end of all men, and the living should lay it to 
heart. And thus at length decayed the fabric which God him- 
self had reared — fhus “ the dust returned to the earth as it was, 
and the spirit to God who gave it.” And thus must conclude 
the history of every life, though protracted to a thousand years, 
whether adorned with virtues or sullied with vice — whether 
passed with noise on the great theatre, or obscurely spent in 
the shade. To this complexion the wise and the beautiful, the 
brave and the good, as well as the simple and the homely, the 
timid and the vicious, must come at last. Here “the rich and 
the poor meet together ; ” here “ the wicked cease from troub- 
ling, and the weary are at rest.” 





II. 

NOAH. 

S^ORE than fifteen hundred years had now rolled by 
since the first day when Adam and Eve stood upon the 
earth. During those years there was indeed enough to 
show that man had become a corrupt and fallen being. 
But still God bore long and patiently with him. He looked 
upon him with an eye of anger, but his anger was mixed with 
compassion. Like as a father pitieth his wayward child, so did 
God pity the sinner then as he does now. His Spirit strove with 
him. Again and again he called him to repentance, but no heed 
was given ; the call was made in vain. 

At length the cup became fuller and fuller, till it reached the 
very brim, and God could spare no longer. And then he deter- 
mined by one awful stroke to destroy the world — that world 
which he had made so fair, but which man had stained and 
marred by sin. He determined to sweep off every family of man 
with one single exception. 

And why that one exception ? Amidst all the wickedness that 
prevailed, God’s eye marked one who differed from the rest — a 
solitary grain of wheat amidst the worthless heap of chaff — a 
single sheep among the herd of goats — a faithful one amidst the 
many faithless. 

This was Noah, who in the time of the world’s greatest wicked- 
ness dared to serve the Lord. Oh how hard it must have been 
at such a time to stand out from the rest and live for God ! It is 

38 


NOAH. 


39 


easy to be on his side when there are many with us. But to 
stand alone when there is no friendly voice to cheer us on, no one 
on whom we can lean, no brother to support us by his example, 
then to declare plainly whose we are and whom we desire to 
serve, — this does indeed require no small amount of grace. 

What a blessed thought it is that the Lord has always had his 
servants in the world ! In Cain’s days there was a righteous 
Abel ; afterward an Enoch, and then a Noah. Sometimes on a 
dark night, when no stars are seen and the lonely traveler loses 
his way, how welcome is the light that glitters from some solitary 
cottage by the roadside ! So in the world’s darkest time, when 
wickedness filled the earth, how blessed to know that there was 
one dwelling from which the light of God’s truth shone forth ! 
Such was the household of Noah. There alone was the Sabbath 
kept holy ; there alone was the voice of prayer and praise heard ; 
there alone was the family altar raised and sacrifice offered ; 
there, in that dwelling, was the home of holiness and peace. 

And now God honors Noah by making known to him his 
purpose concerning the fearful punishment that was hanging 
over the world. He tells him of the coming flood, and bids him 
prepare for it. 

Observe, however, the goodness of God. He does not instantly 
send the flood, but he mercifully pauses before he strikes the 
blow. A long, long warning is given. A respite of a hundred 
and twenty years is granted to a world of sinners. Long did he 
sound the warning bell before he poured out his fury upon them. 

How was this time spent? As for Noah, God had directed 
him to build an ark in which he and his family might be pre- 
served, and he takes God at his word and instantly begins the 
work appointed him. St. Paul says, in Heb. xi., “ Noah, being 
warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, pre- 
pared an ark to the saving of his house.” 

And the rest, what did they do? How did they employ the 
precious breathing-time so graciously allotted to them? Did the 


40 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


thought of that awful visitation bring them on their knees? 
"Was the cry heard through the length and breadth of the earth, 
“ Save, Lord, or we perish ” ? No ; they slept on in carelessness 
and unconcern ; they disbelieved the warning and treated it with 
scorn. 

Meanwhile, Noah was not merely concerned for his own safety 
— he had a heart to feel for others also. He went up and down 
among his fellow-men, entreating, imploring, beseeching them to 
turn to God. But he was as one that mocked unto them. His 
words were as an idle tale. Oh, there must have been deep 
earnestness in his preaching! And he showed, too, by his own 
example, that he himself believed in the truth of his errand. If 
ever a man longed to save others from perishing, it was he. 
Some listened with coldness, some rebuked him for pressing them 
so closely, some treated him with scoffs and insults. 

But during these hundred and twenty years nothing could 
turn Noah from his purpose. He continued building and 'preach- 
ing. Plank after plank was added to the ark, till at length all 
was completed amidst the jeers and scoffs of the beholders. 

So things went on, and the awful day gradually approached. 
The busy world was still occupied about its daily affairs : “ They 
ate, they drank, they married, they were given in marriage, until 
the day that Noah entered into the ark.” There were no signs in 
the heavens that foreboded the threatened storm. Day after day 
the morning dawned, and the evening closed in just as usual ; day 
after day the sun shone brightly in the clear sky, or if the clouds 
gathered, they were soon dispersed again. 

But at length the people looked up and saw the heavens grow- 
ingdark and the sky becoming more and more leaden, and pres- 
ently “the fountains of the great deep were broken up,” and the 
very “ windows of heaven were opened.” Oh, would they not 
at that moment have given worlds had they believed Noah ! 
But it was now too late; their day of grace was forever past. 

Thus was the Lord’s vengeance poured out upon a guilty 


NOAIL 


41 


world,. and thus was his mercy shown toward his believing ser- 
vant. The little company contained in the ark were preserved 
in safety, and Noah lived for years afterward to praise God and 
thank him for his marvelous deliverance. 

Now, there are two points which I am anxious to fix on your 
mind : 

Noah preached by his words , and so may we. We are not all 
ministers, but we may each one of us speak a word for our Mas- 
ter, in the hope of leading others to his happy service. You may 
have no rank in the Church, but I would not have you stand 
back on that account. A private soldier has no rank in the 
army ; but though it is not his duty to command or lead others, 
or even to train the recruits, yet may he not fight and bleed for 
his country? May he not enlist as many soldiers as he can find? 
And so the gospel calls you to fight the good fight of faith, to re- 
cruit the ranks of Christ’s army. It calls upon all, even the 
meanest soldier in the ranks, to engage in this blessed work. 

But Noah preached by his life. He was “a preacher of right- 
eousness.” Take any parish, and imagine ten or twenty holy, 
earnest, consistent men living in it — men whose conduct is guided 
by God’s word, who heartily set themselves to act in all things 
according to his will — men who are living for another world. 
Now, what a vast influence for good such men would have among 
their neighbors ! Their example w T ould tell ; their very lives 
would preach a daily sermon ; their holiness would condemn the 
ungodly ; their earnestness would put to shame the careless ; their 
faith would encourage the timid. 

Ah ! this is the preaching we want. Pulpit-preaching must 
be left to ministers, but the preaching of the daily life is for all. 
Go, dear reader, and preach thus, and God will make you a 
blessing to many. The poorest, the feeblest and most unlearned 
among you may thus show the power and blessedness of real 
religion. 



III. 

ABRAHAM. 

N Abraham we have one who, save our first father 
Adam, is in some respects the most remarkable man, 
the greatest character, in history. Not the mighty 
Nimrods nor Pharaohs nor Alexanders nor Caesars 
nor any other man, has left such a broad mark on the world, 
though he had no home on its surface but a tent, nor property in 
its soil but a tomb. His name is known where the greatest 
emperors and conquerors were never so much as heard of. 
There is no quarter of the globe to which it has not been carried, 
and it is the only one which is venerated alike by Jews and 
Christians and Mohammedans ; for whatever be their differences 
and jealousies, all of them, in one sense or another, claim an equal 
relationship with this distinguished patriarch, saying, “ We have 
Abraham to our father.” Other men, of great statesmanship or 
military powers, have founded nations; but since the days of the 
creation or of the deluge he is the only man who was the father 
of a nation — the fountain from which a whole people sprang. 
The oldest of our families are but of yesterday compared with 
his. And as no house in the world is so ancient, to none has the 
world owed so much as to his. Through him the Saviour came. 
To his descendants God committed those great truths which have 
overthrown the most ancient idolatries, have tamed the wildest 
savage, have emancipated the slave, have raised prostrate hu- 
manity, have dried up its bitterest tears and redressed its greatest 

4 2 



ABRAHAM. 


43 


wrongs, and are destined to overturn Satan’s empire throughout 
the whole bounds of earth, and establish on its ruins the reign of 
a holy and universal peace, restoring Eden to a defiled and dis- 
tracted world, and, as in the days of primeval innocence, to 
humanity the image of its God. 

The biographer of any distinguished man considers himself 
fortunate if he can present, in the frontispiece, his readers with 
a likeness of his subject. We are fortunate enough to possess one 
of Abraham, and in it a likeness more to be depended on than 
those of the Pharaohs the Egyptians have left us carved on their 
tombs, or the marble busts of the Caesars that adorn the galleries 
of Rome. Our likeness of Abraham is a genuine one, he, indeed, 
being the only Scripture character, or rather, the only character 
in all ancient history, of whose portrait so much can be affirmed. 
We have it not in any antique sculpture or painting, but in a 
form more true and faithful. He lives in the well-known and 
characteristic features of his descendants. 

Types of the Church, his race have suffered, and also survived, 
the changes of four thousand years, the saying that described 
their early being equally applicable to their later history — this, 
namely, the more they were afflicted, “ the more they multiplied 
aud grew.” With a tenacity of life unexampled in the history 
of any other people, and which proves them to have been God’s 
peculiar care, neither Babylonian, nor Assyrian, nor Grecian, nor 
Roman, nor long centuries of Christian oppression, has been able 
to destroy, or even to absorb them. Clinging as tenaciously to 
each other as to their faith, they have lived, wedded, died, buried 
among themselves, mingled as little with other nations as oil with 
the water amid which it floats. The English, for example, are a 
mixed race — so mixed that the blood of Britons, Romans, Saxons, 
Danes, Norwegians, meets and mingles in their veins. Not so the 
Jews. It is nigh four thousand years since Isaac and Ishmael 
met to lay their father in his rocky tomb, yet the blood of Abra- 
ham flows as pure in the veins of his Hebrew children as when 


44 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


it first sprang from its source. This is plain from the ver y re- 
markable similarity they bear to each other — a resemblance so 
remarkable that whether he is an old-clothes man or a courtier, 
a distinguished singer or a dirty beggar, one who pants under an 
Indian sun or wraps his shivering form in Arctic furs, walks on 
’Change a prince of merchants or keeps a booth in the foul pur- 
lieus of London or the still fouler Ghetto of Rome, there is no 
mistaking an Israelite. His features, if not his speech, betray 
him. Hot only so, but we recognize these features in the world’s 
old paintings — those which represent the manners of ancient 
Egypt and the events of that time — not far remote from Abra- 
ham’s own day — when Pharaoh, to use the words of Scripture, 
te made the children of Israel to serve with rigor, and made their 
lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar and in bricks.” In all 
ages the Jews have been, and in all countries are still, so like each 
other, that we may safely infer that their original was like them. 
It is impossible to account for this identity of features otherwise 
than that they bear their father’s image — that Abraham’s features 
are repeated and multiplied in theirs. Any person, as I know 
from experience, by observing the remarkable resemblance among 
all the copies of some famous statue — the Apollo Belvedere, for 
instance, or Venus de Medici — is able to form, before seeing it, 
a very correct conception of the original. Even so, since, with a 
few exceptions, all Abraham’s descendants, ancient and modern, 
in this and every other country, bear quite a remarkable resem- 
blance to one another, we may certainly conclude that in the 
Jew we have a faithful portrait and a living likeness of his great 
progenitor. 

Prejudices exist against their type of features as strong almost 
as those felt by many against the negro and colored races, of 
which I could not give a more striking illustration than is to be 
found in the paintings of the old masters. It is a remarkable 
fact that, though our blessed Lord was a Jew, they never give 
him the features of his race, but, as if they sought thereby to in- 


ABRAHAM. 


45 


crease our horror of their crimes, reserve these for Iscariot, who 
betrays him, and for the priests who eye the Man of sorrows with 
scowling and malignant looks. Yet this is a mere prejudice, and 
like that felt against the colored races, is due, as it becomes us to 
recollect, to circumstances more discreditable to Christians than 
to Jews — to those who feel the prejudices than to those who suffer 
from them. The case of the Jews, in fact, is in many respects 
parallel to that of the negro races. Robbed for long centuries 
of their rights as men, regarded with undisguised aversion, treated 
with every possible indignity, and everywhere most cruelly op- 
pressed, what is bad in their character has been the inevitable 
result of circumstances in which others, not their own choice, 
placed them; and for such as made either them or the negrces 
what they now are to abuse and despise them for being so is to 
add insult to injury, and to cruelty the grossest injustice. Like 
their countryman in the parable, they have fallen among thieves, 
and such as cherish the prejudices with which they have been 
long regarded resemble more the priest and Levite that passed 
by on the other side than the good Samaritan who took com- 
passion on the man bleeding and poured wine and oil into his 
cruel wounds. Where the Jews have got a fair chance, they who 
have kept separate have exhibited another property of oil — they 
have risen to the top. Brought under Christian influences, they 
who retained the features of the patriarch’s face have exhibited 
some of the noblest features of his character, by the one as much 
as by the other proving their honorable lineage, and their right 
to say, u We have Abraham to our father.” 

It may be noticed as a curious and interesting fact, that, while 
Abraham is seen to this day in the features which characterize 
Jewish men, the very remarkable beauty of his wife often pre- 
sents and repeats itself in Jewish women. Beauty, no doubt, is 
always a fading charm, and to its envied possessor, in many 
cases, a fatal one. Yet it is a good gift of God, and whether 
found in human beings or in the plumes of a bird, the colors of a 


46 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


flower' or the glowing tints of an evening sky, is a source of inno- 
cent pleasure ; nor can it be wrong to notice that which men in- 
spired of the Holy Ghost not unfrequently mention. They tell 
us, for instance, that “ Rachel was beautiful,” and that “ Esther 
was fair and beautiful.” They celebrate the charms of Abigail ; 
and not confining their remarks to female beauty, they tell us 
that he whose appearance won the hearts of the maids of Israel, 
and whose brave battle with the giant formed the burden of their 
songs, “ was of a beautiful countenance.” What David gave to 
Absalom, his guilty and unhappy son, he probably inherited 
from his own mother. Any way, it is plain from Scripture that, 
while some races are almost hideous from their ugliness, the 
Jewish women were remarkable for their personal charms ; and 
indeed it is alleged that some of the finest specimens of female 
beauty are still found among them. This is more than a curious 
fact. It forms one of those indirect proofs of the truth and 
divinity of the Bible which, though indirect, are not the less but 
the more valuable. The fountain corresponds with the stream, 
the ancient record with present physiological facts ; for it would 
appear from the Bible that Sarah, the mother of these lovely 
women, was perhaps the greatest beauty the painter’s art has 
preserved or poets have sung. Her charms were so remarkable 
that they dazzled the eyes of Egypt, and so enduring that at an 
age whose wrinkles and gray hairs make other women venerable, 
she retained all the bloom and loveliness of youth. 

Water, whether it springs on the shore or bubbles in the moun- 
tain-well where the eagle dresses her plumes and the red deer 
slakes its thirst, never rises higher than its fountain ; and if, in 
like manner, children’s mental powers form a standard whereby 
to judge of their parents’, we must believe Abraham, judging 
from his descendants, to have been in mind, as well as in piety, 
one of the greatest of men. Take, for instance, a skull of each 
of the different races of mankind, and placing them at random 
on a table before an anatomist, ask him to select that which indi- 


ABRAHAM. 


47 


cates the highest mental capacity. Without knowing anything 
whatever of their history — from what graves they were obtained 
or to what branches of the human family they belonged — he lays 
his hand at once on the skull of the Jew. This, take it for all 
in all, is the best on the table. Vastly superior to those of the 
aborigines of Australia and the ancient Peruvians, that, though 
separated by a great gulf from the animal creation, stand at the 
bottom of the human scale, it is visibly superior to the skulls of 
those Greeks and Romans that in ancient, and also of those 
Teutonic races that in modern, times have marched at the head 
of civilization and seemed destined to rule the world. The star 
of Abraham is in the ascendant here. However morally de- 
based, the Jew stands pre-eminent for his mental powers, and 
has retained his superiority in circumstances which have de- 
graded other nations almost to the level of beasts. Amid the 
fire that has burned for ages, the bush remains unconsumed. 
Here, then, is a race which, after suffering oppressions and de- 
gradations sufficient to crush the very soul out of them, is men- 
tally second to none, perhaps superior to any. This is a remark- 
able fact. It proves what the Bible leads us to believe — that a 
special providence watches over the outcasts of Israel, preserving 
them for some grand end. And it proves more — this, namely, 
that Abraham, “the hole of the pit out of which they were 
dug, the rock out of which they were hewn,” their great progeni- 
tor, was no common man, but one who stood, as well in point of 
mental ability as of faith and piety, “head and shoulders” above 
the mass of men. 

This may correct some erroneous notions which many, mis- 
understanding the language of Scripture, entertain regarding the 
government of God. He had a great work to do on the earth, 
and in Abraham he selected a great man to do it — an instrument 
eminently adapted to accomplish his end. This is, so to speak, 
God’s ordinary rule; anything else is exceptional. Having great 
ends to accomplish, did he not in old times select great men to 


48 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


do them, in tlie cases of Moses, of Joshua, of David, of Daniel, 
of Paul, and in later times in the cases of Luther, of Latimer, of 
Calvin, of Knox, and of the Wesleys? Apart altogether from 
their piety, these all were men of pre-eminent natural abilities. 
They were the foremost of their time. No doubt God can work 
by many or by few — smite a giant with a pebble from a strip- 
ling’s sling, or scatter a host by the flashes of a lamp and the 
blare of an empty trumpet ; and for the very purpose of remind- 
ing men that though Paul plant and Apollos water, the increase 
is with him — in saving souls as well as in ruling the destinies of 
the world — he occasionally selects the weakest instruments to ac- 
complish the greatest ends. But such is not God’s ordinary 
practice. They altogether misread or misunderstand his word 
who think otherwise. LIow much such ideas are due to men’s 
greedy selfishness or their supineness, I will not undertake to 
say. But it is not true that any one will do for God’s work, and 
that, while great sacrifices are to be made for secular objects, and 
the most brilliant talents secured for secular offices, the service 
of the King of kings, the offices of the sanctuary, the pulpit, the 
missionary field, the Sabbath-school, may be left to pious weak- 
ness. Such an idea compliments God’s power at the expense of 
his wisdom, it being the part of divine as well as of human wis- 
dom to select the means best fitted for the end in view. 

Before proceeding to the grand moral and religious features of 
the patriarch’s character, I would draw an inference of consider- 
able practical importance from the case of .Abraham and of 
almost all those men who have left a broad mark on their own 
and on future ages. These cases prove that God ordinarily 
works out his purpose by means, and not by miracles — not aside 
from, but according to, the regular course of Nature ; therefore 
should his Church seek to enlist the highest genius on her side. 
Her duty is to remove, in the position or poverty of such as 
minister at her altars, those obstacles which unquestionably deter 
many from entering who would adorn her pulpits and prove of the 


ABRAHAM. 


4U 

highest service to the cause of Christ. To win souls and advance 
his cause in an indifferent and hostile world, let Hannahs give 
their Samuels, and Jesses their Davids; and acting with the wis- 
dom of Saul, who, whenever he found a valiant man took him 
into his service, let the Church, on finding talents associated with 
piety, take them into her service — enlist them in the sacred cause 
of Him who crowns all his other claims on us with this — he 
spared not his own Son to save us. 

ABRAHAM’S CALL. 

The history of infidelity, were it written, would present a suc- 
cession of ignominious defeats — defeats due not to any want of 
ability in those who have assailed the truth, but to this, that its 
defenders have driven them out of all their positions. The his- 
tory, the morality, the theology, the consistency, the authenticity 
and genuineness of the Bible, the truth of its prophecies and the 
very possibility of its miracles, have been all attacked, each in its 
turn, and with the same result. We have seen the soldier return 
from the fields of war with scars as well as medals on his breast ; 
but our religion has come out of a thousand fights unscarred, 
from a thousand fires unscathed. She bears no more evidence of 
the assaults she has sustained than does the air of the swords that 
have cloven it, or the sea of the keels which have ploughed its 
foaming waves — than some bold rocky headland, of the billows 
that, dashing against it in proud but impotent fury, have shivered 
themselves on its sides. With few exceptions, the writings of in- 
fidels have sunk into entire oblivion. Their names, and those of 
their authors, are alike forgotten. Not so the name of Jesus — 
of him Voltaire boasted he would crush; not so the word of 
God — the blessed book which is the world’s most precious 
treasure, and often man’s only solace, as well in palaces as in 
cabins. While the works of once famous skeptics are left to rot 
on bookshelves, where the moth devours their memory and the 
spider wraps them in her web, every year sees the Bible trans- 


50 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


lated into some new tongue, acquire a greater influence and re- 
ceive a wider circulation. Fulfilling its own glorious predic- 
tions, it is bringing nearer the appointed time when, rising over 
all opposition like a flowing and resistless tide, the knowledge 
of the Lord shall cover the earth as the waters the channel of 
the deep. 

One wonders how the men who now assail our faith can hope 
for success where Hobbes and Bolingbroke, Voltaire and Rous- 
seau, David Hume and Gibbon, giants in genius and in intellect, 
totally failed. Christians, possessing their souls in patience and 
peace, may calmly contemplate the puny assaults of modern in- 
fidelity. There is little in these to fill our camp with alarm, or 
make its Elis tremble for the ark of God. Assailing the faith 
from new ground, infidelity undertakes to prove the Bible false 
from its alleged discrepancy with the phenomena of Nature and 
the discoveries of science. But a few years, we doubt not, will 
show that though she has changed her ground, she has not 
changed her doom. He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh, 
the Lord shall have them in derision. Science may, as science 
has already done, guide us to a sounder understanding of some 
things in the word of God. While she corrects any mistakes 
into which the interpreters of Scripture have fallen, there is 
nothing to dread. Why do the heathen rage ? The only result 
of using the facts of science to undermine the foundations of 
religion will resemble that wrought by some angry torrent when, 
sweeping away soil and sand and rubbish, it lays bare and 
thereby makes more plain the solid rock on which the house 
stands, unmoved and unmovable. 

The man who attempts to build a pyramid on its apex would 
not act more absurdly than some modern philosophers, so called. 
They base the most extravagant theories on grounds utterly in- 
adequate to support the ponderous superstructure. Propounding 
doctrines concerning our origin opposed to the Bible and de- 
structive of our dearest hopes, they ask us to embrace them ou 


ABRAHAM. 


51 


grounds such as no judge and jury would attach the least weight 
to in a court of law. On grounds so feeble and puerile, and in 
plain opposition to the facts related in the opening pages of the 
Scriptures, they assert that our origin was in a monkey, or rather 
in a monad . Believe them, and man reached his present con- 
dition by a process of development which required millions of 
years ere it carried him up through the ages of insect, fish, rep- 
tile, bird and beast, to the supremacy he enjoys, the height he 
now stands on. Others, not prepared to commit themselves to 
such extravagant vagaries, but animated with a spirit of equal 
hostility to the Christian faith, assert, on grounds equally weak, 
if not equally ludicrous, that though our first appearance was not 
in the form of a monad, an oyster or a monkey, it was in the 
form of a savage. Believe them, and man’s primeval state was 
not one from which he fell, but from which he rose — one, in fact, 
of lowest savagedom. And however widely these opinions differ, 
if either of them be true, farewell to our fondest hopes and our 
faith in Scripture as the word of God. 

In regard to the latter of these views — for the first we may 
pass by as the ravings of philosophy run mad — it is opposed to 
the oldest and universal traditions of the world. These afford 
abundant evidence that the history of man does not present a 
being rising from a lower to a higher condition, but the reverse. 
Examine the legends of the rudest tribes, and they will be found 
to contain memories, though misty, of a past but higher and 
nobler state of being — of arts, of accomplishments, of a refinement 
of manners and of, in many instances, a purity of morals which 
only exist among them now in tales and songs. Not tradition 
only, but all history besides, proves that man, left to his own 
resources, has not risen, but invariably sunk, in the scale. The 
bias to this, which we explain by the fall, may have been correct- 
ed in certain instances by providential and preternatural causes. 
But who ever examines the records of nations will find that the 
tendency of morals has always been to become more corrupt, 


52 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


and the tendency of religions to become more idolatrous and im- 
pure. They exhibit a constantly increasing departure from the 
truth. In proof of this I appeal to the history, among extinct 
nations, of Greece and Rome, and among existing ones, of India 
and China. Trace their morals and religion upward, and as we 
advance nearer to their source we find the one becoming less im- 
pure and the other less untrue, until a period is reached when 
the resemblance between these and the morals and religious be- 
lief of the patriarchs is striking — is indeed quite remarkable. It 
is like ascending a river whose waters are polluted by the. towns 
and manufactories that have sprung up on its banks — the nearer 
we approach the green hills where it springs from its fountains, 
the purer runs the stream. Man, unaided and left to his own 
resources, has never risen from a lower to a higher state. On 
the contrary, we find the vices which early ages discountenanced 
and forbade becoming not only universally practiced, but even 
shamefully deified, and the one God of man’s first pure faith 
multiplied into hundreds, in some cases into thousands, and in a 
few even into millions, of inferior and usually immoral divinities. 

These remarks, which are not inapplicable to the present times, 
and which may help to reassure the hearts of some seized with 
unnecessary alarm, have been suggested by the fact that Abra- 
ham’s immediate ancestors were idolaters. What a rapid declen- 
sion this ! and what a remarkable illustration of man’s tendency 
to sink rather than to rise in the scale of moral and intellectual 
being ! Almost ere the gray fathers of the flood were dead — ere, 
perhaps, the marks of its awful ravages had vanished from the 
face of the earth, mankind had forgotten its lesson, and begun to 
worship the creature in place of the Creator. Abraham certainly 
was the son of an idolater, and if old Jewish and Mohammedan 
traditions are to be believed, of one who was a maker as well as 
a worshiper of idols. “ Your fathers,” said Joshua to the people 
of Israel, “ dwelt on the other side of the flood, even Terah the 
father of Abraham, and the father of Nahor ; and they served 


ABRAHAM. 


53 


other gods.” Ur of the Chaldees was the home of the patriarch’s 
race, and the religion they professed was the Sabean— a faith of 
Eastern birth, and one which presents idolatry in its oldest and 
least offensive form. 

No man becomes at once and of a sudden either a fiend or a 
saint. His descent into a lower, like his ascent into a higher, 
condition, is gradual — always accomplished, though more rapidly 
in some cases than in others, step by step. Of this the history 
of idolatry presents a striking instance. Look back on Greece 
and Borne. There, in Bacchus and in Venus, and in other 
divinities, we see how men (as they do still in India) make gods 
of the vices which they practice, not only glorying in their 
shame, but throwing the halo of religion around the grossest im- 
moralities. But mankind had not sunk so low as this, nor be- 
come worshipers of stocks and stones, of birds, beasts and creep- 
ing things, in the days of Abraham. That Sabean faith in which 
he was born, and which his fathers followed, and which still lingers 
on earth among the Parsees of Bombay, was the least gross of all 
idolatries — the one into which man first fell and was most prone 
to fall. The idolatry of this religion began with the worship, 
not of false gods, but of Jehovah, the one living and true God, 
under the symbols of the heavenly host. That, man’s first de- 
clension and downward step, was one to warn us, but not much 
to wonder at. Even in these last days, with God’s word in our 
hands, amid the full blaze of gospel light, we find it difficult to 
walk by faith and not by sight; and the eyes of devotees turned 
on cross and crucifix, the walls of churches crowded with images, 
prove how prone man is to lapse into a sensuous religion, and to 
seek by means of some visible object to fix his wandering thoughts 
and inflame his cold devotions. For this purpose the sun, moon 
and stars — especially the first of these — were chosen as images, 
visible symbols, of the invisible God. It was in this character 
that the sun, at least in the first instance, was worshiped. And 
certainly, if God was to be adored through symbols, none could be 


54 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


found so appropriate as that imperial luminary, the ruler of the 
seasons, the source of all light and heat, the very life of Nature, 
which, clothing the forests anew each year with leaves, the pas- 
tures with grass and the fields with corn, resumes his daily course 
with unabating vigor, shows no sign of growth or of decay, and, 
throned in heaven, shines down from its azure heights with 
resplendent, dazzling glory. 

This, the earliest, was certainly the least gross, of all idolatries. 
But that soon befell it which has happened to the images of the 
Roman Catholic and the pictures of the Greek Church. The 
sign came to usurp the place of the thing signified. Ere long it 
was not the Being symbolized, but the symbol itself, that was 
regarded as an object of adoration. And now, when the Church 
of Christ has her course to steer between Rationalism on this 
hand and Ritualism on that, let not the Bible only, but the his- 
tory also of this earliest and least gross idolatry, warn her against 
setting much store on symbols, or leaning toward a sensuous wor- 
ship. The tendency of every such wmrship is to become more 
sensuous, to depart farther and farther from the simplicity of the 
gospel. 

It was out of the Sabean religion as v r ell as out of Ur of the 
Chaldees that Abraham was called. The Jews and the Moham- 
medans also have curious legends about his conversion and the 
sufferings he had to endure for the truth. They say that when 
he was, according to some, fourteen, according to others, forty 
years of age, his mind took a religious turn. At this time ob- 
serving a star when night overshadowed him, he said, “This is 
my Lord j” but keeping his eye on the luminary, and observing 
it sink ere long, he abandoned all faith in it, wisely remarking, 
“I like not gods which set.” As the night wore on and left 
him in painful perplexity, the moon rose up in silver splendor. 
He turned to her, with the delighted exclamation, “ This is my 
Lord.” But following in the wake of the star, she also set, and 
when her bright rim dipped below the horizon, with her set hi3 


ABRAHAM. 


55 


faith in her divinity. By and by, from the purple East, the sun 
leapt up, illuminating the heavens with splendor and bathing the 
world in light. All his dark doubts now scattered with the 
morning mists before its beams. “ This/ ” exclaimed Abraham, 
throwing himself down to worship — “this is my Lord.” But 
when hours had rolled on, the sun also began to sink, and when, 
following star and moon, it vanished from his gaze, old legends 
tell how Abraham rose from his knees to cast aside the faith of 
his fathers and worship Him who alone rules both in heaven and 
in earth. 

Nor is this all these old legends tell us concerning Abraham 
on his being converted from idolatry. He is said to have taken 
advantage of the absence of his people to enter their temple, and 
sparing only the biggest of their idols, break all the rest in 
pieces. Discovering, on their return, the havoc which had been 
wrought, the people were roused to frenzy. They cried, “Who 
hath done this to our gods?” and on being told that it was 
Abraham, they exclaimed, “ Bring him fortli !” “ Hast thou done 
this to our gods?” they said. “Nay,” replied he in mockery — 
“ nay ; the biggest of them hath done it ; but ask them.” “ Thou 
knowest,” was their answer, “that these speak not.” Abraham 
now had them in a corner. To this very point he had wished to 
lead them. So, turning on them, he demanded, “ Do you then 
worship, besides God, that which cannot profit and cannot hurt 
you ? Fie on you !” “ Burn him !” burst from the lips of these 

early persecutors, these fathers of the Inquisition. And the old 
legends go on to tell how a fiery furnace was forthwith kindled, 
and how this bold witness for the truth was cast among the roar- 
ing flames, and how he came forth unhurt, God having spoken 
out of heaven, saying, “ O fire, be thou cold, and a prevention 
unto my servant Abraham !” 

The Bible is silent as to the manner and means and time of 
Abraham’s conversion. But whatever these might be, the work 
was divine — wrought in his heart by Him who gave his servant 


56 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


grace to rise at another call, and go forth, he knew not whither, 
an exile from his native land, to wander in a land of strangers. 
Let it be remarked that in whatever manner he was called and 
converted, his case presents a remarkable example of the sove- 
reignty of divine grace. We are to remember that the true 
religion was not altogether extinct in Abraham’s day. Like 
stars shining, one here and another there, through the clefts and 
openings of a cloudy sky, like those Alpine summits whose snows 
I have seen glowing in rosy sunlight when all the valleys lay 
wrapped in the sombre shades of evening, there were families at 
that time of general idolatry where God was worshiped not only 
in spirit, but in truth. Such was Job’s, for instance. It is 
highly probable that he lived about the same period as Abra- 
ham. There is no allusion to be found in the Book which bears 
his name to any of those remarkable events which distinguished 
the exodus of Israel, and we may therefore conclude that his era 
was not coeval with that of Moses, but preceded it. But there 
are plain allusions in that Book to the Sabean worship, to the 
adoration of the heavenly bodies; and this makes it highly prob- 
able that Job lived about Abraham’s time, and among those 
whose religion corresponded with that of his compatriots. While 
that is highly probable, this is certain— that Melchizedec, whom 
Abraham met, and to whom he paid tithes, was a worshiper of 
the true God, and that those among whom this mysterious per- 
sonage filled the office of a priest must have been so likewise. 
Yet passing by these, God repairs to a family of idolaters, and 
out of them selects a man to be the father of his people and the 
great progenitor of his incarnate Son. Verily, his thoughts are 
not as our thoughts, nor his ways as our ways. His grace is 
free as the wind that bloweth where it listeth ; and here, as in 
many other cases of conversion which present most unlooked-for 
results, we see that “ the first are last and the last are first.” 
Abraham is a childless man. and God chooses him to be the 
father of a mighty nation; Abraham is an idolater, and God 


ABRAHAM. 


57 


appoints him conservator of true religion and the ancestor of the 
world’s Redeemer. By this early as by many other signal acts 
of free, sovereign and almighty grace, how does God teach men 
never to despond or to despair ! His way is in the sea and his 
path in the mighty waters ; nor can we know what purposes he 
intends to serve by us, what usefulness may be ours,. what honors 
may await us, to what blessings and blessed work we may be 
called. “He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth the 
needy out of the dunghill, that he may set him with princes, 
even with the princes of his people. He maketh the barren 
woman to keep house, and be a joyful mother of children. 
Praise ye the Lord !” 

ABRAHAM’S TEMPER OR DISPOSITION. 

In the aspect of his character, Abraham was more like Jesus 
Christ, stood nearer the most illustrious of his descendants, than 
perhaps any man — than any at least I have seen or have read of. 
What a contrast he offers to those sour, selfish, narrow-minded, 
mean, greedy, grasping, ill-tempered or ill-conditioned Christians 
who present religion in a repulsive rather than in an attractive 
aspect, ever reminding us of the saying, The grace of God can 
dwell where neither you nor I could ! 

Where, for example, shall we find such a pattern of courteous- 
ness as Abraham offers for our imitation? It is the noontide 
hour, when, in hot Southern lands, labor, which begins with the 
first blush of dawn, takes a pause and breathing-time. Abra- 
ham sits in his tent door enjoying its grateful shade, and looking 
out on the plain of Mamre, from which the sun’s fiery beams 
have driven men, birds and panting beasts to such shelter as 
rocks and trees and tents afford. He descries three men ap- 
proaching, making for his tent, toiling along under the broiling 
heat. Strangers, neither clansmen nor neighbors nor friends, 
they have no claim on him. He may wait their approach, leav- 
ing them to solicit his hospitality. Not he. Abraham rises— 


58 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


nay, he runs to meet them ; and mingling respect with kindness, 
courtly manners with the most benevolent intentions, he bows 
himself to the ground. Not one who says, The favor which is 
worth the giving is worth the ashing , he anticipates their request 
and makes offer of his hospitality. But they may fear being 
burdensome to him. So, to remove any reluctance on their part 
to accept his kindness, he makes light of it, speaking of what he 
was about to offer as no tax on his generosity — as but “ a morsel 
of bread.” Nor is this all. With that delicate regard to others' 
feelings which true kindness prompts, he would make it appear 
that they will oblige him more by accepting than he does them 
by offering his hospitality. u My lord,” he says, addressing him 
who appeared the chief man of the three — “ my lord, if now I 
have found favor in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee, from 
thy servant; let a little water be fetched and wash your feet; and 
rest yourselves under the tree ; and I will fetch a morsel of bread, 
and comfort ye your hearts; after that ye shall pass on.” And 
in a short while — for Sarah and the servants are hastily sum- 
moned from their different occupations to supply the wants of 
the strangers — the three are seated at an ample board, Abraham 
giving the finishing touch to his courtesy by respectfully standing 
beside his guests while they eat. Throughout the whole trans- 
action, he presents a beautiful model of what was once understood 
by that excellent though now much misapplied term, “a gentle- 
man.” This is what every Christian should be. Modern use 
has greatly perverted the words gentleman and gentlewoman from 
their original and excellent meaning. What they indicate cannot 
be conveyed by a patent of nobility. It belongs to no rank. It 
is the ornament of the highest, and should be the ambition of the 
humblest. The temper and manners these terms express are 
compressed into the one brief exhortation of the apostle, u Be 
courteous.” Courteousness is a Christian duty, and nowhere can 
a better example of it be found than in this story — the eight 
verses of Genesis which relate it containing a better lesson on 


ABRAHAM. 


5y 


true politeness than the whole volume of Lord Chesterfield’s 
“ Letters to his Son.” 

Abraham’s generosity — a still higher virtue — is equally re- 
markable. In proof of that, look to the manner in which he 
treated Lot, his nephew. Early deprived of a parent’s care, 
fatherless, if not also motherless, Lot is, I may say, adopted by 
Abraham — received into his nest, taken under his sheltering 
wing. Not so unhappy as some who have had no other return 
for such kindness as he rendered Lot than the basest, blackest 
ingratitude, whose lives have been embittered and their bosoms 
stung by those they had kindly nursed, still Abraham’s connec- 
tion with Lot cost him much care and trouble. Quarrels soon 
arose between their servants, and matters at length came to this 
pass — that they must part. Now, there can be no doubt that 
Lot lay under the strongest obligations to Abraham. It was his 
part to accept his uncle’s judgment in this juncture, and leave to 
his decision their separate paths in life. The patriarch had been 
a father to him — a friend kinder than many fathers. Besides, 
Abraham was the elder of the two, and also the greater of the 
two ; more than that, the land of Canaan, which was Lot’s only 
by sufferance, was his by promise. Abraham might have said to 
Lot, “ You have no right whatever to this land — to a foot of it; 
go in peace, but seek your portion elsewhere. Such is my decision, 
and, remember, I have power to enforce it.” Yet the uncle 
generously bestows on the nephew a share of his own property ; 
more than that, as if he was the younger and also the weaker of 
the two — as if the land of Canaan had been promised to the other 
rather than to him — as if he had been the party who had received 
rather than conferred favors — in determining their respective 
positions, Abraham leaves the choice to Lot. He will take Lot’s 
leavings. “ Let there be no strife, I pray thee,” says this right 
noble man, “ between me and thee. We be brethren. Is not the 
whole land before thee? If thou wilt take the left hand, I will 
go to the right ; or if thou depart to the right hand, I will go to 


60 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


the left.” What self-denial, self-control, self-sacrifice, in that 
speech ! What liberal and magnanimous generosity his ! What 
a model of a Christian this man ! 

Men often do wrong by insisting on their rights. Far be that 
from Abraham ! He seeks not his own, but the things of others, 
and here offers one of the costliest sacrifices ever laid on the altar 
of peace. This sacrifice, be it remarked and remembered, did not 
go without its reward. Abraham found it, as, I cannot doubt, 
he very sensibly and very gratefully felt, on that eventful morn- 
ing when, standing on Bethel’s rocky heights, he turned his gaze 
from the plain — Lot’s choice— all smoking like a burning fur- 
nace, to the green hills around dotted with his flocks, to his herds 
safely browsing on the dewy pastures, and to the tents below, 
where his family were reposing beneath the shadow of the shield 
of God, every head laid on its pillow of sweet sleep and peace. 
Still, as then, let me add, good men will, and shall sooner or 
later, profit by every sacrifice they make for peace. Let us 
“ seek peace and pursue it.” 

But never did Abraham, or any one else, present a finer model 
of disinterested generosity and true nobility of mind than he, 
amid scenes that usually inflame the worst and most selfish pas- 
sions of our nature. He stands on a field strewn with the ghastly 
dead ; the air is filled with the shouts of conquerors and the 
groans of captives; a rich spoil lies scattered at his feet; his 
cheek is still red with the flush and his sword with the blood of 
battle; and his bearing there offers an example of one of those 
bright gleams which occasionally relieve the horrors and gild the 
lurid clouds of war. A man of peace, the battle was not of his 
seeking. But the news had reached his tents that Lot and his 
family are prisoners. The tidings awaken all his old affections. 
His trumpet sounds to arms. Lot must be rescued. With more 
than three hundred retainers following his banner, he pushes on 
at their head, overtakes the foe, and throwing himself on their 
ranks, achieves a surprise, a rescue and a signal victory. By thf 


ABRAHAM. 


61 


rights of war, the spoil, at least the greater part of it, falls to 
him, and therefore the king of Sodom, content to get back his 
subjects, and perhaps the captives to boot, says, “ Give me the 
persons and take the goods to thyself.” He might have done so. 
Many would have done so — all, indeed, who, taking advantage 
of forms of law, and regardless of justice, gratitude and the claims 
of others, insist on their legal rights. Not so did Abraham. 
What a rebuke his conduct administers to such mean and mer- 
cenary spirits ! What an example his of that high Christian 
principle that sets humanity and justice above mere legal claims 
— the law of God, in fact, above the law of man — and scorns to 
touch what the latter may through its imperfections grant, but a 
higher law, the Golden Rule, “ As ye would that others should do 
unto you, do ye also unto them,” forbids a man to take ! With a 
single eye to the glory of God and the just claims of the unfor- 
tunate, Abraham gives up his legal rights, and to the king of 
Sodom returns this magnanimous answer : “ I have lift up mine 
hand unto the Lord, the most high God, the possessor of heaven 
and earth, that I will not take from a thread to a shoe-latchet, 
lest thou shouldest say, I have made Abram rich.” Here is a 
pattern to copy. Playing as high-minded a part as this grand 
old patriarch, equally well illustrating the Christian maxim, 
“ Whether ye eat or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the 
glory of God,” how would we adorn the doctrine of God our 
Saviour ! 

The tenderness of Abraham’s heart is as remarkable as the 
loftiness, purity and sternness of his virtue. Sodom was a sink 
of iniquity. Abraham could not but know that, and could not 
but hold the habits of its people in unutterable abhorrence. Yet 
see how he mourns its doom, regarding its sinners with such pity 
as filled the eyes of Jesus, and drew from his heart this lament- 
able cry, “ O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have 
gathered thy children as a hen gathereth her chickens under her 
wings, and ye would not ! ” There have been men, even women, 


62 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


who went sternly to the work of executing God’s judgments — 
cutting away the foul cancer from the breast of society with un- 
flinching nerves, with an eye that knew no pity and a hand that 
did not spare. “ Blessed above women,” sung Deborah, “ shall 
Jael, the wife of Heber, be. She put her hand to the nail, and 
her right hand to the workmen’s hammer, and with the ham- 
mer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head ; so let all thine 
enemies perish, O Lord.” What a contrast to that strong iron 
heart the tenderness of Abraham’s ! Sodom awakens all his 
pity. Considerations of its enormous guilt are swallowed up in 
the contemplation of its impending doom. Truest, tenderest 
type of his own illustrious Son, with the spirit that dropped in 
the tears and flows in the blood of Jesus, he casts himself between 
God’s anger and the guilty city. He asks, he pleads, he prays 
for mercy — not that the righteous only be saved, but that the 
wicked be spared for the sake of the righteous. In his anxiety 
to save their lives he imperils his own — stands in the way, 
braves and encounters the danger of turning the Avenger’s sword 
on himself. Once and again and again he puts God’s long-suffer- 
ing patience to the trial. He detains him — keeps him listening 
to new pleas and requests. Like the gallant crew who, moved 
by the sight of drowning wretches that hang in the shrouds and 
stretch out their hands for help, after repeated failures to make 
the wreck, venture life-boat and lives once more amid the roaring 
breakers, Abraham cries, “ Oh, let not my Lord be angry, and I 
will speak yet but this once; peradventure ten shall be found 
there.” 

Like some tall mountain whose top catches the beams of the 
morning sun ere he rises on the lower hills and sleeping home- 
steads of the winding valleys, this patriarch, as he saw Christ’s 
day, seems to have caught Christ’s spirit, afar off. Surely his 
was the spirit of Christ — that mind of which it is said, “ Now if 
any man have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of his.” Com- 
passion, pity, love for sinners, than these there is no surer mark 


ABRAHAM. 


63 


and test of true religion. May they be found in us as in Jesus 
Christ ! — as in Abraham ! — as in him, perhaps the greatest of all 
the patriarch’s merely human descendants, who, penetrated with 
compassion for his guilty, unhappy countrymen, wrote, “I lie 
not, my conscience also bearing me witness, that I have great 
heaviness and sorrow in my heart. For I could wish that my- 
self were accursed from Christ for my brethren.” 

ABKAHAM’S FAITH AND PIETY. 

In a clear wintry night, when planets, constellations and all 
the orbs of heaven are sparkling through the frosty air, we see 
how, as Paul says, “ one star differeth from another star in glory.” 
But though some are larger and much more luminous than others, 
which, now caught, now lost, seem but points of light, not a few 
appear equally brilliant. Of these rivals that are flaming and 
wheeling in different quarters of the firmament, it were hard to 
say which is pre-eminent — the biggest, brightest gem in the dusky 
crown of night. This difficulty is one we do not meet on opening 
the Bible at the eleventh chapter of St. Paul’s Epistle to the 
Hebrews. With examples of faith extending all the way down 
from the remote days of Abel to those last times, when the saints 
of God were stoned and sawn asunder, tempted and slain with 
the sword, it presents a bright and glorious spectacle. We gaze 
on that firmament, if I may so speak, which shines above the 
Church through the long dark night of time, and which, as the 
night wears on, grows more and more resplendent with those 
whom God is calling up to shine in heaven as the stars for ever 
and ever. History contains no catalogue of equally illustrious 
names. It relates no such famous deeds as stand recorded in that 
grand chapter. But though these stars of the Church resemble 
those of the material heavens in this, that one differeth from 
another in glory, they differ in this, on the other hand, that for 
the power, grandeur and, in whatever aspect indeed it be regarded, 
for the greatness of his faith, the severity of its trial and the bril- 


64 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


liancy of its triumphs, Abraham shines pre-eminent. He has no 
equal, no rival. To change the figure, he holds such pre-emi- 
nence among these grand exemplars of trust in God and faith in 
his unfailing word as does the centre mountain among the group 
above whose rocky pinnacles and snow-clad summits it rears its 
imperial dome. 

Compare Abraham with some, or with any one, of the wor- 
thies whose names are embalmed in that chapter. Take Moses. 
“ Who am I that I should go unto Pharaoh ?” he said. With 
the rod in his hand that he had already seen changed into a living 
serpent, and that was hereafter to change rivers into blood and 
the bed of ocean into dry land, Moses shrank from the dangerous 
task; he hesitated, conjuring up difficulties and urging objections 
till the divine anger was kindled against him. Take Gideon. 
“O my Lord, wherewith shall I save Israel?” he cries. “ Be- 
hold, my family is poor in Manasseh, and I am the least in my 
father’s house.” And saying so, there he stands on the threshing- 
floor, nor leaves it for a nobler sphere till miracles strengthen and 
sustain his faith — till a bowlful of water is wrung from the fleece 
around which all the ground lay dry, and on another morning 
the fleece lies dry on meadows sparkling with dew, by bushes 
hung thick with diamonds. And to mention but one other, 
though not the least, of the worthies enrolled in that chapter, take 
David. See how he staggers beneath his load ! Look at him 
repairing for safety and shelter to the Philistines, as if God had 
ever given to his enemies occasion for the taunt, “ Where is now 
thy God ?” Yet trusting them rather than Him who had de- 
livered him from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear and 
the hand of the giant champion whom he encountered with no 
other weapon than sling and pebble, he flies to the country of the 
Philistines and throws himself into their arms, distrusting God, 
and crying, “ I shall now perish one day by the hand of Saul.” 

Look now at Abraham’s faith ! It stood the test of much 
severer trials. He is called to leave his country and his kin- 


ABRAHAM. 


65 


dred — called to go he knew not where — called to be he knew not 
what. Nor does he hesitate. He instantly responds, repairs to 
Canaan, and lives and dies in the confident belief that it shall be- 
long to him and to his. Yet he found no place there to rest the 
sole of his foot — his weary foot — but was tossed about during a 
long lifetime here and there, like a sea-weed which is floated 
hither and thither on the wandering billows, cast on the shore by 
this tide and swept away by that. Looking not at the things 
which are seen, but at the things which are not seen, the life of 
all believers is more or less one of faith. But of Abraham and 
his whole life in the land of Canaan, of every journey he under- 
took, every march he made, and every footprint he left on its soil 
or on its sands, it might be literally as well as figuratively said — it 
was true of him in respect of this world as well as of the next as 
it never was of any other man — “He walked by faith and not by 
sight” 

This faith culminates on Moriah — the mount where, laying 
Isaac on the altar, it endures its greatest trial and achieves its 
greatest triumph. It furnishes the only key to the questions 
that rise unbidden as we read the story — a fond and doting 
father, how could Abraham undertake the task ? how was he able 
to contemplate imbruing his hands in the blood of his son? how 
did his reason withstand the shock ? how did his heart not break? 
how had he nerve to disclose the dreadful truth to Isaac, to kiss 
him, to bind his naked limbs, to draw the knife from its sheath 
and raise his arm for the blow? how did not the cords of life 
snap under the strain, and Abraham, spared the horrid sacrifice, 
fall dead on the altar— a pitiful sight, a father clasping within 
his lifeless arms the beloved form of his son ? It is by the power 
of faith he stands there, the knife glittering in his hand, his arm 
raised to strike — the conqueror of Nature. The blow shall make 
him childless, yet he believes that he shall be the father of a 
mighty nation ; that when the flames have consumed the loved 
form at his side, Isaac shall rise from their ashes ; and that after 
5 


66 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


this bloody tragedy and greatest act of worship, with Isaac re- 
stored to his arms, as they climbed, they shall descend, the mount 
together. Who can help exclaiming, “ O Abraham, great is thy 
faith !” 

Yet the patriarch had his failings — as who has not? — and 
they are written to warn him “ who thinketh he standeth, to take 
heed lest he fall.” “If thou hast run with the footmen and they 
have wearied thee,” asks the prophet, “ canst thou contend with 
horsemen?” Yet, strange to say, though Abraham contended 
successfully in the race with horsemen, distancing them all, he 
was outstripped by footmen. He trusted God to restore the life 
of his son, yet did not trust him to protect the honor of his wife. 
Telling a lie about Sarah, he failed in the very grace for which 
he was most distinguished. Should not these things teach us to 
watch and pray that we enter not into temptation, and never 
under any circumstances to forget the warning, “Be not high- 
minded, but fear” ? When Nehemiah, bold as a lion, said, 
“ Shall such a man as I flee ?” how much more might we have 
expected such a man as Abraham to say, “ Shall such a man as I 
lie?” His faith failed him. This great and venerable patriarch 
stands convicted of a mean equivocation. And who that sees 
him vainly trying to gloss over his shame can help exclaiming, 
“ Lord, what is man ?” Surely the best and worst of men have 
but one refuge — the blood and righteousness of Jesus. 

Another practical and equally important remark we may draw 
from Abraham’s history, ere he leaves the stage to give place to 
his servant, whom we shall next introduce. Paul explains the 
patriarch’s pre-eminent triumph by his pre-eminent faith. But 
what explains itf What fed the faith wherein his great, strength 
lay? Challenging comparison with any, and excelling all, in 
that grace, we may justly apply to him the g' owing terms and 
bold figures of the prophet : “ He was a cedar in Lebanon, with 
high stature and fair branches and shadowing shroud — the cedars 
of God could not hide him — the fir trees were not like h ; « boughs, 


ABRAHAM. 


67 


and the chestnut trees were not like his branches, nor was any 
tree in the garden of God like unto him for beauty : his root,” 
he adds, explaining how this cedar towered above the loftiest 
trees, giant monarch of the forest — “ his root was by the great 
waters.” And what that root found in streams which, fed by 
the snows and seaming the sides of Lebanon, hottest summers 
never dried and coldest winters never froze, the unequaled faith 
of Abraham found in close and constant communion with God. 
Like Enoch, he walked with God. Each important transaction 
of life was entered on in a pious spirit and hallowed by religious 
exercises. His tent was a moving temple ; his household was a 
pilgrim church. Wherever he rested, whether by the venerable 
oak of Mamre, or on the olive slopes of Hebron, or on the lofty, 
forest-crowned ridge of Bethel, an altar rose, and his prayers 
went up with its smoke to heaven. Such daily intimate and 
loving communion did this grand saint maintain with heaven 
that God calls him his “ friend ;” and honoring his faith with a 
higher than any earthly title, the Church has crowned him 
“ Father of the Faithful.” He lived on terms of fellowship with 
God such as had not been seen since the days of Eden. Voices 
addressed him from the skies, angels paid visits to his tent, and 
visions of celestial glory hallowed his lowly couch and mingled 
with his nightly dreams. He was a man of prayer, and therefore 
he was a man of power. Setting us an example that we should 
follow his steps, thus, to revert to language borrowed from the 
stateliest of Lebanon’s cedars — thus was he “ fai • in his greatness 
and in the length of his branches, for his root vas by the great 
waters.” 



IV. 

ELIEZER. 

HE French have established a diligence that starts from 
the seacoast at Beyrout, and now climbing the steeps 
and now winding through the picturesque valleys of 
Lebanon, descends after a long day’s journey on the 
city of Damascus. This city is a point of interest to every 
traveler who visits the Holy Land ; nor any wonder, since there 
are points not a few in which it claims pre-eminence over any 
- other place in the world. 

Akin to the veneration with which the men of his day regarded 
Methuselah, hoar with the snows of nine hundred sixty and nine 
years — with which we ourselves should gaze on the oldest living 
man, which I felt on looking even on the ruins of a decayed but 
living yew that, a sapling at the date of David’s battle with Go- 
liah, was a great tree, mantled in the mists or white with the 
snows of our hills, that winter night the Saviour was born — akin 
to this is the feeling with which an intelligent and thoughtful 
traveler must tread the streets of Damascus. Said by Josephus 
to have been founded by a great-grandson of Noah, and certainly 
spreading along the banks of Abana at the time Abraham entered 
the land of Canaan, Damascus is the oldest existing inhabited 
city of the world. Of all those that were coeval with it, it only 
stands. The hand of Time, committing its ravages less suddenly 
but no less surely than the flood that swept away Enoch, the first 




ELIEZEB. 


69 


city, as it did Eden, the first garden in the world, has left no 
vther memorial of these than their names in the page of history 
or some desolate and lonely ruin. It is not so with Damascus. 
Long anterior to the building either of Athens or of Rome it was 
a busy city, and, sole survivor of a remote antiquity, it is a busy 
city still. How great its age ! It boasts of streets along which 
the tide of human life has ebbed and flowed for nearly four 
thousand years. Were the title one which could be properly 
applied to any place but heaven, not Rome, but Damascus, 
should be called “The Eternal City.” 

Singularly interesting to antiquaries on account of its extreme 
antiquity, this city presents also features of peculiar interest to 
men engaged in the pursuits of trade, whether they be the arts 
of peace or war they cultivate. Famous during long ages for its 
silk manufactures, it gives its own name to a fabric which is 
esteemed of superior richness and value — damask being called 
so from the circumstance that it was invented in Damascus and 
first woven in its looms. Its weapons of steel were even more 
famous than its webs of silk. Happy the man in battle who 
carried a Damascus blade, no other place forging swords of such 
exquisite temper. I know not but probably the Bible alludes to 
the superior excellence of these where it says, “ Shall iron break 
the northern iron and the steel ?” I once happened to see this 
steel put to the test. It was in France, and in the chemistry 
class of the Sorbonne. In the course of a lecture on iron, 
Thenard, the professor, produced a Damascus blade, stating that 
he believed that these swords owed their remarkable temper to the 
iron of which they were made being smelted by the charcoal of a 
thorn-bush that grew in the desert. To put it to the trial, he 
placed the sword in the hand of a very powerful man, his assist- 
ant, desiring him to strike it with all his might against a bar of 
iron. With the arm of a giant the assistant sent the blade flash- 
ing around his head, and then down on the iron block, into 
which, when I expected to see it shivered like glass, it embedded 


70 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


itself, quivering but uninjured, giving, besides a remarkable 
proof of the trustworthiness of the sword, new force to the 
proverb, True as steel . 

But Damascus, which her poets dignify with the title of 
“ Pearl of the East/ 7 presents attractive charms to travelers that 
have no stake in trade and feel no interest in antiquarian studies; 
for besides being the oldest, it is in some of its aspects the most 
beautiful, of cities. With its white towers and minarets shooting 
up through the groves of green palms into the transparent air, it 
lies within sight of the snow-crowned Hermon, reposing at the 
feet of a grand mountain-range, and encircled by a zone of gar- 
dens and of orchards of variously-tinted foliage and the finest 
fruits. Its plain is watered by Abana and Pharpar. These 
rivers, reckoned by the Syrian leper better than all the waters 
of Israel, rush forth from their mountain-gorges to be parted into 
a thousand streams, which, foaming onward, dance and sparkle 
in bright sunshine, and cover the soil on their banks with a car- 
pet of flowery verdure. No city in the world is more, perhaps 
none so much, worthy of the encomium which the pride and 
patriotism of the Jews pronounced on their Jerusalem, “ Beau- 
tiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth.” Travelers have 
used the most glowing terms and exhausted the powers of lan- 
guage in their attempts to describe its charms, but no expressions 
can give us so vivid an idea of them as the part Mohammed acted 
when, a camel-driver traversing the neighboring mountains, he 
stood in the gorge where the city first burst on his view. Bapt 
for a while in astonishment, he gazed on the wondrous scene, but 
by and by recovered himself; and fearing, should he venture down 
into the city, that its charms would seduce him into forgetting the 
vast schemes of his life, he turned aside and passed on, saying, 
with a self-denial and determination of purpose Christians would 
do well to imitate, Man can have but one paradise , and mine is 
fixed above. 

Legends also cling to Damascus and the places around which 


ELIEZER. 


71 


invest them with no ordinary interest. The origin and founda- 
tion of the city are lost in the mists of ages, but there is a common 
belief that he who looks on its lovely plain sees the cradle of the 
human race, and that it was from its red clay soil that God formed 
the first man, and also gave him his name of Adam, which is, 
being interpreted, red day. If this is true, it imparts an air of 
probability to another of their legends — this, namely, that it was 
near Damascus that Abel fell a victim to his brother’s envy, and 
his blood went up to heaven for vengeance on earth’s first, if not 
worst, murderer. Here, on one of the mountain heights to the 
west of the city, is the place, it is said, where Abraham stood on 
that eventful day when, following with anxious eye the setting 
course of star and moon and sun, he abandoned their worship for 
that of the true God ; and there, down on the plain in yonder 
vast mound, is the sepulchre of Nimrod — that mighty hunter 
before the Lord, who, as the founder of Babel, looms so large 
through the mists of four thousand years, the first of earth’s old 
great monarchs. 

These traditions, however interesting, may possibly be mere 
fancies, although in a sackful of such legends there are almost 
always some grains of truth. But though these were ranked 
with the “ Arabian Nights’ Entertainments,” there are facts asso- 
ciated with Damascus which, after Bethlehem and Jerusalem, in- 
vest it with greater sacredness than any other spot on earth. It 
is interesting as the home of Naaman the Syrian — he who, ad- 
vised by a captive girl that had compassion on her master, 
repaired to Israel and lost both his pride and leprosy in the 
waters of the Jordan. It is interesting as the city from whose 
gates the proud armies marched forth over which God wrought 
some of his greatest triumphs on behalf of his ancient people, 
striking that host of a sudden with blindness, and this with such 
a panic that with Benhadad at their head, and two-and-thirty 
allied princes swelling the rout, they fled like sheep before a 
handful of the warriors of Israel. It is interesting to the students 


72 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


of Scripture through its association with the two greatest of the 
prophets. Probably Elijah, but certainly Elisha, walked its street. 
God had sent him there; and there he unveiled such a future of 
crime and cruelty before Hazael,that, hardened sinner as the sol- 
dier was, he started in horror from his own image, exclaiming, 
“ Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing ?” But what 
especially makes Damascus interesting and “ holy ground ” is, 
that it formed the scene of an event which, in its influence on 
the world, takes rank next to the birth and death of the Son of 
God. It was nigh to this city the great apostle of the Gentiles 
was converted. And what man occupies such a place in sacred 
history as he? — did so much in his lifetime, or has done so much 
by his writings, to proclaim and propagate the gospel ? This 
“ chief of sinners,” as he humbly, penitently called himself, was 
unquestionably the chief of apostles — in writings, as in labors 
and in trials, more abundant than them all. Next to Jesus 
Christ, whose a name is as ointment poured forth,” and than 
whose there is no other name given under heaven whereby we 
can be saved, no name on earth, in the homes of the godly, is 
such a “ household word” as Paul’s; and in heaven, next to our 
Redeemer, I can believe him to be regarded with more universal 
interest than any one else in glory. How many have his plead- 
ings moved ! how many hearts have the arrows from his quiver 
pierced ! to how many have his words brought life and comfort ! 
and how many hearts, strengthened thereby, have entered the 
dark valley singing his own grand song, “ O death, where is thy 
sting ! O grave, where is thy victory ? The sting of death is 
sin, and the strength of sin is the law ; but thanks be to God who 
giveth me the victory through my Lord Jesus Christ”! There 
the light shone that paled a noonday sun, and the darkness fell 
that issued in quenchless light, and Jesus last visited our world 
to convert his greatest persecutor into his greatest preacher. For 
these reasons Damascus will ever be among the sacred places 
which a Christian would like to visit. 


EL1EZER. 


73 


The reputed birthplace of Adam, and certainly the spiritual 
birthplace of Paul, perhaps the greatest of his sons, thi§ city gave 
birth to another man, of whom, and of whose remarkable virtues, 
it has no reason to be ashamed. Domestic servants form a very 
large, a very useful, and a very important class in society, and it 
can boast of having given birth to one who occupies a place of 
as great pre-eminence among them as Paul perhaps did in the 
apostleship of the Church. And so, appreciating the higher 
virtues, however humble the sphere be which they adorn, more 
than for its beauty of situation, more than for its famous fabrics, 
more than for its hoar antiquity, I regard Damascus with interest 
as the birthplace of him whose name stands at the head of this 
chapter — the steward of Abraham’s house: as his own master calls 
him, “ This Eliezer of Damascus.” 

Consider his position in life. He was a servant. He be- 
longed to a class which the Bible highly honors, and by which 
it should be highly honored in return. Gratitude for the esti- 
mation in which it holds those whom many despise, and for the 
elevation to which it has raised some whom it found treated as 
slaves and trodden in the dust, requires that. The oldest and 
best of books, this Book, for the rules it supplies for this life and 
the hopes it presents of a better one, is adapted to all classes of 
society, and should be equally valued by all. This was well ex- 
pressed by two very different but both impressive scenes. There 
in yonder palace, where a royal lady, about to leave her home 
and rise in time to the position of a queen, receives a deputation. 
They have come to offer her, in the name of the women of her 
country, a parting marriage gift. It is no costly ornament, 
fashioned of gold and flashing with precious gems — diamonds 
from Indian mines or pearls from the deep — such as the wealth 
and willingness of the donors could have purchased. A healthy 
sign of the age and a noble testimony to its religious character, 
the gift is a copy of the Holy Scriptures— this, as in long cen- 
turies hence it will be told, was the marriage gift it was thought 


74 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


worthy of a Christian nation to bestow, and worthy of a royal 
princess to receive. And there also, on yon stormy shore, where, 
amid the wreck the night had wrought, and the waves, still 
thundering as they sullenly retire, had left on the beach, lies the 
naked form of a drowned sailor-boy. He had stripped for one 
last brave fight for life, and wears naught but a handkerchief 
bound round his cold breast. Insensible to pity, and unawed by 
the presence of death, those who sought the wreck as vultures 
swoop down on their prey, rushed on the body and tore away the 
handkerchief — tore it open, certain that it held within its folds 
gold — his little fortune; something very valuable for a man in 
such an hour to say, “ I’ll sink or swim with it.” They were 
right. But it was not gold. It was the poor lad’s Bible — also 
a parting gift, and the more precious that it was a mother’s. 

Equally suited for a royal princess and a cabin-boy, and all 
indeed upward from the broad base to the apex of the social 
pyramid, the Bible deserves to be held in higher esteem by no 
class than by servants. There is none in the world on which it 
bestows a higher honor, to whom indeed it addresses a call so 
high and noble — it being to servants, or rather, (for such were 
most of those whom he addressed,) to slaves — to them it says, 
“ Adorn the doctrine of God your Saviour.” He who so orders 
his life and conversation as to bring no dishonor or reproach on 
religion, who gives no occasion to its enemies to blaspheme, nor 
by his falls and inconsistencies furnishes scandals to be told in 
Gath and published in the streets of Ashkelon, does well. He 
may thank God that amid life’s slippery paths he has prayed, 
nor prayed in vain, “ Hold up my goings that my footsteps slip 
not.” He does better still in whose life religion presents itself 
less in a negative and more in a positive form. For while it is 
well to depart from evil, it is better to do good ; nor does he live 
in vain who exemplifies by his daily life and conversation the 
pure, and virtuous, and holy, and beneficent, and sublime, and 
saving, doctrines of God his Saviour. The first is good, the 


ELIEZER. 


(b 

second is better, but the last is best of all. So to live as to be 
beautiful as well as living epistles of Jesus Christ, seen and read 
of all men — so to live as to recommend the truth to the admira- 
tion and love of others — so to live as to constrain them to sa} T , 
“ What a good and blessed thing is true religion !” — as in some 
measure to win the encomium of her who, loosing on Jesus, ex- 
claimed, “ Blessed is the womb that, bare thee, and the paps which 
thou hast sucked ! ” so to live, in fact, as to resemble those books 
which, in addition to their proper contents, are bound in gold, 
are illuminated and illustrated with paintings, or those pillars 
which, while like their plainer neighbors supporting the super- 
structure, are also its ornaments, rising gracefully from the floor 
in fluted columns and crowned with wreaths of flowers, — this is 
best of all. 

A Christian can aspire no higher. And let it be remembered 
that for a work so sacred Paul singles out servants. It is not 
kings on their thrones, nor lords in their castles, nor high digni- 
taries of Church or State, but these, the humble occupants of the 
kitchen, the sun-browned laborers of the cottage and fields, whom 
he calls, not merely to exemplify or illustrate, but to adorn , the 
doctrine of God their Saviour. Let others respect them ; any 
way, let servants respect themselves. Such honor have not all 
his saints. Ample compensation this for what the world regards 
as their humble position — as it were to the lark, could she be dis- 
satisfied with her grassy nest, to think that though no singing 
bird has such a lowly home, none soar so high as she, or sing so 
near to the gates of heaven. Eliezer belonged to this class, and 
is a grand pattern to all servants who are seeking through grace 
to fulfill their high calling and adorn the doctrine of God their 
Saviour. It will be my aim to set him forth in this light as we 
proceed. Meanwhile, I go on to show that his condition in life 
was below even that of a servant, as we understand the term. 
My object in this is not to detract from, but rather add to, our 
admiration of the man, such a circumstance being calculated to 


76 


GREAT MEN OF GCD . 


bring out liis merits all the more plainly, as the dark cloud on 
which they are painted does the colors of a rainbow, or its foil 
the brilliancy of a precious gem. 

Servants, in our sense of the term, are those whose skill, time 
and labor are their own property. Disposing of these for a longer 
or shorter period at their own free will, and as they judge most to 
their advantage, they belong to themselves, and need call no man 
master unless they choose and as they choose. The few excepted 
who, having inherited or acquired a fortune, are independent of 
the gains of labor, there is hardly any class that enjoys such an 
amount of freedom as domestic servants. Few, on the whole, are 
so well off ; and when servants sufficiently appreciate the advan- 
tages they enjoy under a kind Christian roof, none have more 
occasion, from a sense of gratitude to God, so to demean them- 
selves and discharge the duties of their calling as to “ adorn the 
doctrine of God their Saviour.” With wages adequate to their 
present and, unless wasted on vanity, to their prospective wants, 
found in food and many of the comforts of life, they enjoy free- 
dom from cares that press on the heads of the house, and may 
sing at their work like birds who have their wants supplied, 
though they neither sow nor reap. Their business binds down 
many other classes to one spot, as their roots do the trees to 
the soil ; but servants enjoy a freedom approaching that of the 
denizens of the air — “ The world is all before them, where to 
choose.” 

The fisherman is bound to the seashore, the shepherd to the 
lonely hills, the ploughman to the glebe, the merchant to the 
busy town, lawyers to the neighborhood of courts, shopkeepers 
are nailed to their counters, pastors have to move, as they should 
shine, within the orbits of their congregations, and thousands of 
our artisans, panting to breathe ftesh air and gladden their eyes 
with green fields, have to live amid the smoke of furnaces and 
the ceaseless roar of machinery. Many are, but many more may 
be called, slaves to business. So unlike slavery, however, is the 


ELIEZER. 


77 


condition of our servants, that numbers of them acquire the rest- 
less habits of the nomade races, of gypsies or Tartars. They 
roam from one situation to another, shifting with every shifting 
term — an abuse of their liberty much to be regretted. Reducing 
the value of character and leading to license of life and manners, 
this habit proves most unfavorable both to their moral and mate- 
rial interests, presenting, in a class in whose welfare all should 
take a kind and Christian interest, too many illustrations of the 
proverb, “ A rolling stone gathers no moss.” 

Eliezer had no such opportunities of abusing liberty. He was 
not a servant in our sense of the term. As Abraham's other 
servants — and indeed almost all servants in those days were — he 
was a slave ; and that such was the true condition of the patriarch’s 
servants is plainly indicated by what is told us of the three hun- 
dred armed followers whom he summoned to his standard on 
hastening to the rescue of Lot — this, namely, that they “ were 
born in his own house." It proves nothing to the contrary that 
this man, holding a high place in his master’s house, was one 
whom Abraham trusted with his confidence, whom he employed 
in important domestic affairs, and whom, indeed, he at one time 
probably intended to constitute his heir. It was not an uncom- 
mon thing in those days, when slavery was a comparatively mild 
and gentle servitude, for such as had been bought and sold to rise 
in the changes of Fortune from the bottom to the very top of her 
wheel. Witness Esther’s romantic and splendid history. And 
to take a case in some respects parallel to that of Eliezer, we 
know that he did not hold a more respectable and responsible 
office in the house of Abraham than Joseph held in that of 
Potiphar. “ Behold," he said, in answer to the solicitations of 
the temptress, “ my master wotteth not what is with me in the 
house, and hath committed all that he hath to my hand. There 
is none greater in this house than I : neither hath he kept back 
anything from me but thee, because thou art his wife. How then 
can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?" Still, 


78 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


Joseph, this paragon of virtue, the man who has associated his 
name with the highest recorded example of untarnished purity 
and truest honor, was a slave; nor is there any reason to suppose 
that Eliezer occupied in Abraham’s household a better position 
than Joseph did in Potiphar’s, who was bought of the Ishmael* 
ites, and — shame to say it! — had been bought by them of his 
own brothers. 

We defend no slavery, but abhor all kinds of it, be it domestic, 
political, ecclesiastical or spiritual. May God break every yoke ! 
Yet be it observed that while Eliezer was in a condition of servi- 
tude, his — that of patriarchal times — was no such servitude as in 
our days has produced the most revolting cruelties and unutter- 
able crimes. Then, as is manifest to any one who reads the 
books of Moses, the system of bondage — not established by God, 
but only tolerated among his ancient people — had the usual 
severities of slavery so ameliorated, had the abuses it is liable to 
so carefully restrained, and had its term in ordinary circum- 
stances so limited, that to quote it either as a sanction or defence 
of modern slavery is wickedly to confound things that widely 
differ. At the same time, I may remark that while God, so to 
speak, winked at slavery — as at a plurality of wives, and other 
customs opposed to the spirit of the gospel — in these early times, 
we see in the very infancy of the system evidences of its essen- 
tially vicious character. Hercules is said to have strangled ser- 
pents, but it strangled virtue in its cradle. Among those quiet 
pastoral scenes where Jacob’s sons, steeling their hearts against 
his cries and entreaties, sell their brother, and in those tented 
homes, far from the pollution and barefaced vice of cities, where 
Sarah and Leah and Rachel dispose, as if they were cattle, of the 
bodies of their handmaids, we see the cropping out of a system 
which has everywhere blighted and blasted and rudely trampled 
on the freedom of man and the virtue of woman. It has been 
fully developed since then. Look at it under the most favorable 
circumstances. Examine the fruits it has borne even in what 


ELIEZER. 


79 


may be called a Christian soil. See fathers selling their chil- 
dren, and worse still, debauching their own daughters; w* men 
tied naked to the whipping-post, and while they writhe under 
the bloody lash, filling the air and heaven itself with their 
agonizing cries; virgin modesty openly scorned; all female 
virtue and manly respect crushed out of humanity; the black 
man degraded into a brute, and the white man changed into a 
monster! And was not a system which thus, deepening the 
degradation and aggravating the curse of the fall, defeated the 
blessed ends for which God’s Son descended on a ruined world, 
well named by Wesley the sum of all villanies f It was next to 
blaspheming the name of God for its apologists and abettors — 
some of them, alas ! ministers of the gospel — to pretend that it 
had any sanation in the Bible, or speak of Eliezer’s gentle, noble, 
virtuous, generous and saintly master as that “ good old slave- 
holder, Abraham.” Happily, there is no temptation now to call 
sweet bitter, and bitter sweet, good evil, and evil good. We and 
‘our brethren in England are done with this great crime, but 
unhappily neither of us, it would seem, with its consequences, 
though we paid a heavier penalty than they did, the stain that 
dimmed the lustre of our banner-stars not being washed out 
but in a sea of blood. 

In making these remarks, which have been suggested by the 
case of Eliezer, I freely admit that there Avere cases — not a few 
cases perhaps — where the natural results of slavery were much 
modified, if not altogether neutralized — cases where masters, de- 
ploring the existence of Avhat they did not establish and could 
not abolish, ruled with a gentle hand, and holding themselves ' 
responsible to God for the duties of their position, won the re- 
gards and reigned in the hearts of their slaves. And ruling like 
Abraham, such men found among that despised and down- 
trodden race — whom some of our so-called philosophers regard, 
and it is no breach of charity to believe Avould, had they the 
poAver, treat, as little better than brutes — examples of affection to 


80 


GREAT MEN OF GOD 


their master and of fidelity to their trust not inferior to that of 
Eliezer of Damascus. Before I proceed to his character, I would 
give one example, asking those who read it to consider if kind- 
ness, sympathy with their circumstances, forbearance with their 
faults, interest in their welfare, and courteous and Christian 
treatment could produce such a noble character out of negro 
slaves, how many such might they not produce among our 
domestic servants ? 

On the deck of a foundering vessel stood a negro slave. The 
last man left on board, he was about to step into the life-boat. 
She was already laden almost to the gunwale, to the water-edge. 
Bearing in his arms what seemed a heavy bundle, the boat’s 
crew, who with difficulty kept her afloat in the roaring sea, re- 
fused to receive him. If he came, it must be unencumbered and 
alone. On that they insisted. He must either leave the bundle 
and leap in, or throw it in and stay to perish. Pressing it to his 
bosom, he opened its folds, and there, warmly wrapped, lay two 
little children whom their father had committed to his care. He 
kissed them, and bade the sailors carry his affectionate farewell 
to his master, telling him how faithfully he had fulfilled his 
charge. Then lowering the children into the boat, which pushed 
off, the dark man stood alone on the deck, to go down with the 
sinking ship, a noble example of bravery and true fidelity and 
the “ love that seeketh not its own.” 

I lately turned to the census of Great Britain, tc see what 
light it would throw on my remark that servants are not only 
a very important, but also a very numerous, class of the com- 
munity. With the exception of agricultural out-door laborers, 
who amounted in 1851 to 1,077,627, there is no class so nume- 
rous. The tables, which, not excepting her Majesty from their 
lists, give one queen, give 1,000,000 and more of servants, as 
follows : 


ELIEZER. 


81 


Servants, domestic (general) 754,926 

Coachmen 7,579 

Cooks 48,806 

Gardeners 5,052 

Grooms 16,194 

Housekeepers 50,574 

Housemaids 55,935 

Nurses 39,139 

Inn-servants 60,586 


1,038,791 

In the light of this prodigious number, of the fact that within 
Great Britain there were in 1851 more than one million of 
domestic servants — a mass certainly not diminished but increased 
during the last fifteen years — the subject of this chapter assumes 
an aspect of immense importance. In this view, the pattern of a 
good servant presents an object, if not of higher, of wider and 
much more general, interest than even that of a good sovereign. 
And such a pattern we have, as I now proceed to set forth, in 
Abraham’s steward — as his master called him, in “this Eliezer 
of Damascus.” 

Other stones besides the keystone go to form an arch, but with- 
out it, though formed of solid granite, they are useless — no better, 
be they two or two hundred, than as many cobwebs, to sustain a 
building or to span a roaring river. Locking all the rest together, 
it is the keystone that gives their value to the others. Take it 
away, and they become a mass of useless rubbish. Now, such 
is the virtue which we assign to fidelity among the qualifications 
that form a good servant, and fit any one, whether filling a public 
or private sphere, for a position of trust. The truthfulness that 
scorns to resort to an equivocation or tell a lie, the honesty that 
would not defraud another of the value of a pin, the fidelity, in 
one word, that, with a single eye to a master’s interest is as dili- 
gent and dutiful out of his sight as in it, behind his back as be- 
fore his face, — this is the first and greatest property of a good 
servant — one, indeed, that in the judgment of every reasonable 


82 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


and considerate master will make amends for many faults, and be 
like the “ charity that covereth a multitude of sins.” 

The very long period — to apply these remarks to Eliezer — 
during which he held the important office of steward in Abra- 
ham’s house, proves that he possessed this quality in an eminent 
degree. Though frequent change of place, in some instances, 
may be more a servant’s misfortune than his fault, it is not with- 
out reason that a long period of service is regarded as the best 
proof of fitness and fidelity ; for though mere talent, or a happy 
stroke of fortune, may raise a man or woman to a position of 
trust, it is only by trustworthiness that they can keep it. Some 
shift at almost every term, floating about in society like seaweed, 
the wrack of ocean that changes its place on the shore at every 
tide ; but Eliezer grew gray in the same house, and held the same 
office for at least fifty years. He was steward before Isaac was 
born, and still steward when Isaac was married — two events 
separated by nearly half a century. In this point of view he 
should be regarded as a pattern servant — a model it were as 
much for the interests of servants as of their masters they more 
frequently copied. True to his earthly, as we all should be to 
our heavenly, Master, Eliezer was a “good and faithful servant,” 
and this, which his long possession of office demonstrates, is 
beautifully illustrated by an interesting chapter in Abraham’s 
history. 

No man in the Bible plays a more high-minded and honorable 
part than Eliezer, though a servant, and in one sense a slave. 
Fully to comprehend that and appreciate his fidelity, it must be 
remembered that the birth of Isaac, though a happy event to 
Abraham and Sarah, was far otherwise, in a worldly point of 
view, to him. It inflicted a blow on Eliezer which it needed 
uncommon magnanimity and piety to bear. Till Isaac appeared, 
this man had good hopes of succeeding to his master’s fortune. 
Such is the way I read, and the meaning I attach to, these words 
of Abraham : “I go childless, and the steward of my house is 


ELIEZER. 


83 


this Eliezer of Damascus. Behold, to me thou hast given no 
seed: and lo, one born in my house is mine heir” — this Eliezer, 
one of my slaves, or a child of his. This, no doubt, supposes 
that, in lack of offspring by Sarah, Abraham intended to set aside 
Lot, his nephew, and also his relatives in Mesopotamia — a reso- 
lution which, to those who are ignorant of Eastern habits, may 
seem unlikely, almost incredible. But it was not so in Abra- 
ham’s age, nor is it so still in those regions of the world where 
he lived, and where events are frequently occurring to produce a 
strong impression of the fact that it is God who setteth up one 
and putteth down another. There the revolutions of the wheel 
of fortune are as strange as sudden — raising, as we read in the 
book of Esther, a beautiful slave to share his bed and throne 
with the king of Persia, and taking a man from the gate where 
he was a porter, and even from the foot of a gallows, to make 
him, the first minister of state. . In illustration of that, hear what 
Forbes says: “It is still the custom in India, especially among 
the Mohammedans, that in default of children, and sometimes 
where there are lineal descendants, the master of a family adopts 
a slave, frequently a half- Abyssinian of the darkest hue, for his 
heir. He educates him agreeably to his wishes, and marries him 
to one of his daughters. As the reward of superior merit, or to 
suit the caprice of an arbitrary despot, this honor is also conferred 
on a slave recently purchased or already grown up in the family, 
and to him he bequeaths his wealth in preference to his nephews 
or any collateral branches. This is a custom of great antiquity 
in the East, and prevalent among the most refined and civilized 
nations.” 

But the bright prospects which this custom and the future 
opened to Eliezer vanished at the birth of Isaac. We cannot 
doubt that he bore his disappointment nobly, and for his dear 
master’s sake welcomed and even loved the boy who had come 
between him and a splendid fortune. And yet one hope may 
still have lingered, and risen sometimes unbidden, in his bosom. 


84 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


Might not Isaac choose to live unwedded, and die, leaving no 
heir behind ? But this expectation, if he ever cherished it, was 
also to be extinguished ; and it was surely no small trial to his 
fidelity when, commissioned to seek a wife for Isaac, Eliezer had, 
with his own hand, to quench his last hope of rising in the 
world — of exchanging poverty for affluence, and a state of servi- 
tude for freedom. In such circumstances most people would 
have entrusted the office to another agent. Committing it into 
the hands of one who had strong temptations to play his master 
false, Abraham, more than by any language, expressed his con- 
fidence in the fidelity of his servant, and that he believed this 
Eliezer of Damascus to be true as its famous steel. What a pat- 
tern of faithfulness the servant in whom his master could repose 
such faith ! He was an honor to his class, and not to his class 
only, but to our common nature. The case recalls a circumstance 
that happened in our own country, and deserved the admiration 
with which I read it. A lawsuit, breeding its usual passions, had 
sprung up between two neighbors. When the time approached 
for its being heard in court, one of the parties called on the other 
to say that he did not think it necessary both should lose their 
time going each to state his case before the judge. “Such faith,” 
he said, “ have I in your integrity, and that you will do as much 
justice to my claims as to your own, that I will commit my 
cause into your hands, leaving you, after having stated the argu- 
ments on your side, to state them on mine.” What rare and 
great faith to put in any man ! Yet the event justified it, he in 
whose integrity the other reposed such confidence stating the case 
so fairly that he lost his own cause and won his opponent’s. 

Still more trying were the circumstances in which Eliezer justi- 
fied Abraham’s confidence — nobly justified it. Left to manage 
the affair as he deemed best, he selected for presents some costly 
and splendid ornaments ; and attended by a retinue that indicated 
both the rank of his master and the importance of his mission, 
fhis faithful servant, bidding a long farewell to all his own hopes 


ELIEZER. 


85 


of greatness, set out for Mesopotamia. Brown with the dust 
and scorched with the heat and worn out with the toils of a long 
journey, he at length arrives within sight of Haran, and descends 
to water his camels at a well outside the city. It was about the 
evening hour — the time when the sun in these hot countries, 
shining with tempered rays or kindling the west with his dying 
glories, invites people to walk abroad, and the 'world, like a 
candle which blazes up before it expires, for a brief period re- 
sumes its activity ere it sinks into the repose of night. At this 
hour the women of the city were wont to go forth to draw water, 
even those of rank in these simple and early days preferring work 
to ennui or idleness, deeming it no more dishonor to bake bread 
than to eat it, to make a dress than to wear it, to draw water 
than to drink it — in short, thinking it no shame to engage in 
what we call, and many despise as, menial occupations. Know- 
ing this, and that she whom God intends for Isaac’s wife may be 
among the women who shall soon come trooping to the well, 
Eliezer, like a faithful servant who thinks more of his master’s 
business than of his own ease, immediately seeks direction from 
God. He casts himself on Providence, saying, “ O Lord God of 
my master Abraham, I pray thee send me good speed this day, 
and show kindness unto my master Abraham. And let it come 
to pass, that the damsel to whom I shall say, Let down thy 
pitcher, I pray thee, that I may drink; and she shall say, Drink, 
and I will give thy camels drink also : let the same be she that 
thou hast appointed for thy servant Isaac ; and thereby shall I 
know that thou hast shown kindness unto my master.” What 
an unselfish, noble regard to his master breathes out in this 
prayer, and what wisdom also in seeking one for Isaac who, by 
her bearing to himself, should prove herself not high-minded, 
but humble; not idle, but industrious; not rude, but courteous; 
not cold, but kind ! 

The Book of Daniel relates a remarkable instance of immediate 
answer to prayer. “ While I was speaking,” says the prophet, 


86 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


“ and praying, and confessing my sin and the sin of my people 
Israel, and presenting my supplication before the Lord my God 
for the holy mountain of my God ; yea, while I was speaking in 
prayer, even the man Gabriel, whom I had seen in the vision at 
the beginning, being caused to fly swiftly, touched me . . . and 
said, O Daniel, at the beginning of thy supplications the com- 
mandment came forth, and I am come to show thee ; for thou 
art greatly beloved.” “ Greatly beloved” I can believe Eliezer 
also to have been, for God has no respect of persons, honoring 
men, whether they be servants or sovereigns, as the spectators do 
actors on the stage, not for the part they play, but for the way 
they play it. His prayer was also promptly answered. “ Before 
he had done speaking,” as the Bible says — ere the prayer he 
offered, with his eyes on the city gates, had left his lips — a 
woman comes out, and with form graceful and erect, elastic step 
and a water-pitcher poised on her shoulder, makes straight for 
the well. Her attire is such as virgins wore, and her counte- 
nance, which beams with the graces that nor time nor wrinkles 
nor disease can efface, is exceeding beautiful — a woman this to 
grace Isaac’s house, and tenderly recall to his father’s memory 
the charms that lay mouldering in Machpelah’s cave. Can this 
lovely vision be God’s answer to his prayer? He will try — put 
it to the test he has arranged. Accosting the maiden as she 
leaves the well, he said, “Let me, I pray thee, drink a little 
water.” Her gracious reply shows that his arrow has hit the 
mark. It is she, Nahor’s daughter. Nor does He who here, as 
often, proves himself forward to answer prayer, however back- 
ward we may be to make itj fail still further to give Eliezer 
“ good speed.” Isaac’s proxy, he woos and wins the maid, left, 
as all women should be in a matter of such unspeakable import- 
ance, to her own free choice. Giving her heart with her hand, 
her ready answer to Laban’s question, “ Wilt thou go with this 
man?” is, “I will go.” Eliezer has executed his commission. 
And when, in the form of a bride who drops her veil to conceal 


ELIEZER. 


87 


her blushes, he presents Isaac with one of the fairest flowers of 
the East, and not needing marriage revels to drown the recollec- 
tion of his own disappointment, forgets it in the happiness of his 
master, how does he justify the confidence of Abraham, and prove 
himself worthy, in a subordinate sense, of the eulogium that shall 
crown the labors of every Christian’s life, “ Well done, good and 
faithful servant !” 

Eliezer’s diligence as a servant is almost as conspicuous as his 
fidelity in that beautiful history which, opening up to us many 
interesting glimpses of Eastern and ancient manners, relates how 
Isaac got his wife. There are servants who are honest enough, 
but lazy. They frequently postpone, as, alas ! too many do in 
the important affairs of salvation, present duties to what they 
call a more convenient season. “ Slothful in business,” they go 
about their work without pith or energy. But Eliezer went to 
his with a will, as they say; nor, to use a common proverb, did 
he let the grass grow at his heels . On entering Laban’s house he 
finds a grateful change from the toil and hardships of his journey. 
Servants, summoned to the rites of hospitality, hasten to undo 
his sandals and wash his feet ; luxurious couches invite him to 
repose : weary and worn, gladly would he rest ; and poorly sus- 
tained on the pulse and dried fruits that formed the fare of the 
long journey, nature turns with keen appetite to the smoking 
board that invites him to sit down and eat. But, pattern to all 
of us in the highest matters, and to servants in their daily and 
ordinary avocations, he sets the claims of duty before all things 
else. What his hand finds to do this man will do now, and do 
with all his might. He could have found a hundred excuses for 
delay, but listens to none. He rushes on business. As if every 
hour and moment were too precious to be lost, lie proceeds at 
once to the matter in hand, and says, waving away the feast, “ I 
will not eat till I have told mine errand.” It was his meat and 
drink to do his master’s will. Let it be ours, as it was Christ’s, 
our great Exemplar, to do the will of our Father in heaven. 


88 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


In coasting along the newly-discovered shores of New Zealand, 
Captain Cook, with that sagacity which, in the case of John Knox 
and others, was mistaken for prophetic power, remarked that the 
time might come when these islands would form productive and 
valuable colonies — gems in the crown of Britain. Struck with 
the richness of the foliage and gigantic size of the forest trees, he 
inferred that that must be a deep rich soil which bore such mag- 
nificent timber. Reasoning after this fashion, we might fairly 
have concluded that the extraordinary virtues of Eliezer must 
have had their root in a devout and pious heart. Nay, we might 
have drawn a conclusion favorable to his piety from the very 
character of his master. Abraham was not less likely than 
David, and than every good man should be, to regulate his 
household on these holy principles. “ Mine eyes shall be upon 
the faithful of the land, that they may dwell with me : he that 
walketh in a perfect way, he shall serve me : he that worketh 
deceit shall not dwell within my house : he that telleth lies shall 
not tarry in my sight.” But Eliezer’s piety is, no more than his 
fidelity and diligence, matter of conjecture. In this story he 
appears pre-eminent as a man of prayer. He displays an extra- 
ordinary confidence in the providence and faithfulness of God. 
He casts himself on Him whom he loves to call his master’s God 
with almost as much faith as his master himself could have done. 
With the first dawn of success he bows his head and worships 
the Lord. “ Blessed,” he cries, “ be the Lord God of my master 
Abraham, who hath not left destitute my master of his mercy and 
his truth.” Not in our judgment only, but his own, it is not his 
own skill, but the Lord who leads him ; it is not good fortune, 
but the Lord who speeds him ; and indeed it were difficult to say 
whether the sentiments he breathes are most fragrant with piety 
toward God or with affection to his master. The saying, Like 
master y like man, had never a happier or more beautiful illustra- 
tion than in the venerable patriarch and his pious steward. 

Were there more masters like Abraham there would certainly 


ELlEZEJt. 


89 


be more servants like Eliezer — more who would in their honesty, 
fidelity and piety show the results of a master’s or mistress’s holy 
example — the benefits, by some servants too lightly esteemed, 
which may be expected from dwelling with a religious family, in 
a house where the Sabbath is carefully observed and God is daily 
worshiped. I have heard servants loudly complained of, and 
unfavorable contrasts drawn between those of our own and of 
older times. I would not conceal their faults, though with a 
kind hand I would rather lay them bare, that they might be 
amended. Yet when I have heard some complaining, for 
example, of the ingratitude of servants, I have been tempted to 
ask what many of them have to be grateful for. They have 
feelings to be hurt as well as others, and how have I seen them 
lacerated and rudely torn ! Removed from home and friends, 
they are peculiarly sensitive to kindness, but its words in many 
instances never fall on their ear. Affections that, like tendrils 
torn from their support, would attach themselves, in lack of 
father or mother, to master or mistress, are left to lie bleeding on 
the ground, and in many instances are trodden under foot. Far 
from parental care, no kind eye watches over them, nor kind 
voice warns them of the snares that beset their feet. Many show 
no more interest in their servants’ souls than if they had no souls 
to be saved, and less care is taken to preserve their virtue from 
seducers than the family-plate from thieves. They may well ask, 
in such cases, “ What have we to be grateful for ?” I do not 
defend their faults; but so far as my knowledge and experience 
go, it is but justice to them to say that, were more regard paid to 
the feelings of servants, more forbearance shown with their fail- 
ings, more pains taken to make them happy, to keep them from 
the paths of vice, to cultivate their virtues and bless their souls, 
there would be less occasion to complain of their depravity and of 
the degeneracy of the times. With more holy we should have many 
more happy households, presenting, as in Abraham’s, the beautiful 
sight of pious servants and pious masters growing gray together. 


90 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


Let me frankly tell servants, cn the other hand, that they 
often have themselves to blame. They forfeit respect by a 
miserable aping of the manners of their superiors. They waste 
on their indulgences or on vain and showy attire the means which 
would save a parent from the degradation of public charity and 
provide for the wants of their own old age. Yielding to the 
temptation of higher wages, they will leave a Christian house for 
one where they will see no good, but much bad, example, im- 
periling their precious souls, like Lot, when, less repelled by its 
sins than allured by its green and well-watered pastures, he 
“ pitched his tent toward Sodom.” If crimes are committed 
against servants, they are also committed by them. Falsehood 
and dishonesty are not the worst they may commit; and the 
guilt of receiving some simple and unsuspicious one into a house 
to accomplish her ruin is only equaled by that of the servant who 
carries vice into a virtuous family, and more wickedly betrays 
her trust than it were to steal down at midnight with muffled 
foot and open the door to thieves. 

There are many good servants in the world. Who would be 
so, let them take for their directory and motives these words of 
St. Paul: “ Servants, obey in all things your masters according 
to the flesh ; not with eye service as men pleasers, but in single- 
ness of heart, fearing God : and whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, 
as to the Lord and not unto men : knowing that of the Lord ye 
shall receive the reward of the inheritance, for ye serve Christ.” 
Such God will reward, though they should meet here only cold 
neglect. But since good servants are as valuable to a good mas- 
ter as he can be to them, they may rest assured that, with the 
exceptional cases, their virtues will not go unrewarded even of 
men. With all its faults, there has been no age of the world in 
which diligence and fidelity, to say nothing of piety, have not 
been held in high esteem. Not the least interesting of the monu- 
ments I saw amid the venerable ruins of Rome was one which 
held within its broken urn some half-burned bones. They were 


ELIEZER. 


91 


the ashes of one who, as appeared from the inscription on the 
tablet, had belonged to Caesar’s household, and to the memory of 
whose virtues as a faithful, honest and devoted servant, the 
emperor himself had ordered that marble to be raised. When 
wandering among the tombstones of a quiet churchyard, nothing 
has pleased me more than to light on one raised by a family over 
the grave of some old faithful nurse or aged retainer of their 
house ; and near by this “ gray metropolis ” of Scotland there 
lies a cemetery where the traveler who goes to meditate among 
the tombs will find a monumental stone erected by Britannia’s 
good sovereign to the mem or} 7 of a faithful servant. Such honors 
are rare — too rare, too seldom bestowed. Let servants see to it 
that they are not too seldom deserved, and that, “ doing all as to 
the Lord and not to men,” they earn, besides their wages, such a 
character as his master might have engraven on Eliezer’s tomb- 
stone — “ Not slothful in business, fekvent in spirit, 

SERVING THE LORD.” 



A 



y. 

ISAAC. 

BRAHAM and Sarah were for many years childless, 
and long did they have to wait for the son whom God 
had so repeatedly promised to give them. But at length 
their faith was rewarded, and Isaac was born to them 
in their old age. 

Of Isaac’s childhood we know scarcely anything. When eight 
days old, he was circumcised, and thus was made a member of the 
Jewish Church, and no doubt he was brought up as a servant of 
God from his very infancy. His pious parents watched over him 
with no common care, and taught him early to walk in the paths 
of holiness. 

Scripture tells us that when a boy he suffered greatly from the 
contempt of his half-brother Ishmael — so much so that Abraham 
was forced to drive out Ishmael and expel him from his home. 

And now picture to yourself Isaac grown up to manhood. 
Abraham was at this time considerably more than a hundred 
years old, and Sarah was not much less. Not only did they look on 
their son as the joy and support of their declining years, but they 
regarded him as a precious gift from the Lord, for which they 
never ceased to be thankful. They were constantly reminded, 
too, that through this very son God was going to bestow the most 
glorious blessings on the world. 

Oh, what a damper, then, to their hopes and expectations must 
it have been when God commanded that this Isaac — this child 



92 











ISAAC. 


93 


of promise — should be put to death, and that too by Abraham’s 
own hand ! And when father and son were journeying together 
to the spot where this extraordinary sacrifice was to be made, 
how touching must that inquiry have been which broke forth 
from Isaac, “ My father, behold the fire and the wood ; but where 
is the lamb for a burnt-offering?” 

Now, mark the quiet, patient, cheerful submission of Isaac. 
There was no struggle to escape from death, no upbraiding words 
addressed to his parent. He was now thirty years old, and might 
therefore have offered resistance. But there he lies like a lamb 
ready for the slaughter and as a sheep before her shearers. It is 
enough for him to know that such was God’s command, and he 
was therefore willing to lay down his life. 

I need not remind you how God in his mercy interfered and 
spared Isaac, and how Abraham and his son returned from 
Mount Moriah with hearts full of thankfulness and joy. Their 
faith had been put to the severest trial that we can possibly 
imagine, and it proved to be like silver “ purified seven times in 
the fire.” 

Oh that we may be as willing as Isaac was to suffer at God’s 
bidding! Oh that, like Paul, we may be ready “not to be 
bound only, but also to die” ! It is not likely that we shall be 
tried as these servants of God were, but we should desire to have 
the same holy steadfastness and the same lively faith that they 
had, desiring only “that Christ may be magnified in our bodies, 
whether it be by life or by death.” 

We now come to an event of much importance to Isaac — his 
marriage. His father had taken the greatest care to provide for 
him such a wife as God would approve. He had sent on this 
errand a trusty servant on whom he could depend, and he had 
sought anxiously the guiding hand of God. Many a long mile 
did his servant travel, and at length he found Kebekah, the very 
person whom God himself had chosen. 

When the news reached Isaac, he must have felt very happy 


94 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


in the assurance that this matter was from the Lord, and that in 
taking Rebekah for his wife he would be acting according to his 
will. As the damsel draws near her future home, Isaac goes 
forth to meet her. It was eventide, and he had been spending 
some time in secret meditation. No doubt this was his daily 
custom, and I dare say he found no little comfort and refresh- 
ment in thus holding communion with God. 

Dear reader, do you know anything of this holy meditation? 
Do you love to be alone with your heavenly Father ? David 
recommends this exercise in the Book of Psalms. He says, 
“ Commune with thine own heart.” And he himself found the 
blessedness of it: it warmed his heart and made it glow within 
him. “ While I was thus musing,” he says, “the fire burned.” 

It is very good for us sometimes to get alone and think over 
God’s past dealings with us, his mercies and our shortcomings. 
It is good to think of the Saviour and his amazing love to us, 
and of that home which he has prepared for those who serve 
him here. 

Isaac’s married life was a very happy one. I do not say that 
it was all happiness; he had his ups and downs as well as our- 
selves. It was not all brightness; he had his dark days, as most 
of us have. His path was not always strewed with flowers; 
sometimes it was rough and thorny. 

His parents were taken from him in a good old age, but he 
mourned over them not as one without hope, for he felt that they 
were blessed, dying in the Lord. 

At their father’s grave the two brothers, who had probably 
been separated for years, met once more. Such solemn seasons 
have often proved a time of blessing, and hearts which have long 
been torn asunder have thus been drawn together. Such was the 
happy effect of Abraham’s death on Isaac and Ishmael. 

Shortly after the loss of his father, two children were born 
unto Isaac and Rebekah. But Satan soon spoiled their joy, for 
he tempted them to make favorites of their children. Isaac had 


ISAAC. 


95 


a preference for the eldest son Esau, and Rebekah for Jacob. 
This favoritism brought great trouble into the little household, 
and was the cause of much future strife between the twin- 
brothers. 

How careful should parents be to avoid all partiality as re- 
gards their children! Their affection should be divided as 
equally as possible ; and if unhappily a preference is felt, they 
should watch against it, and carefully avoid any outward marks 
of it. 

Yes, Isaac’s portion was one of trouble as well as joy. At one 
time, in order to preserve life, he was forced to leave his own 
native land, where a famine had broken out, and to live for a 
time among the Philistines. It was a heavy trial to him to 
sojourn among a strange people, and a people, too, who knew 
nothing of the only true God ; but it was a matter of necessity 
and not of choice. 

We see, however, in this how God watched over his chosen 
servant. Not only did he protect him from harm, but he greatly 
blessed him during his sojourn among these strangers. We read 
that Isaac “ sowed in that land, and received in the same year a 
hundredfold, and the Lord blessed him ; and the man waxed 
great” — so much so that the Philistines looked upon him with 
an envious eye. But the Lord again and again assured him that 
all would be well, and that he was under his special care. 

Happy those who have committed their cause to God ! They 
may meet with trials in the world ; the scoffs and jeers of un- 
godly men may fall like hail around them; but in his hands 
they are safe, and he will make all things work together for 
their good. 

But Isaac had other troubles toward the close of his life. For 
many years he was afflicted with blindness, and during this time 
his declining days were saddened by the deceit of one of his sons 
and the ungodliness of the other. 

Thus was Isaac punished for his weakness in preferring one of 


96 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


his children to the other. And thus we see how, even in the case 
of God’s servants, he chastens them for any departure from the 
right way. 

But the Lord loved Isaac, and afflicted him for his good. The 
scourge that smote him was from a Father’s hand ; the cup that 
he was called to drink was mixed by a Father’s love. And now 
Isaac is far out of the reach of trials; he is a dweller in that 
happy land where tears are never shed, because sorrow is un- 
known. 

Blessed Lord, send us trials if we need them ; chasten us if 
thou wilt ; but leave us not to ourselves. Above all, “ cast us 
not off in the time of old age ; forsake us not when our strength 
faileth.” 




VI. 

JACOB. 

BRAHAM was a hero, Jacob was ‘a plain man, dwell- 
ing in tents/ Abraham we feel to be above ourselves, 
Jacob to be like ourselves.” So the distinction between 
the two great patriarchs has been drawn out by a cele- 
brated theologian . 1 “Few and evil have the days of the years 
of my life been, and have not attained unto the days of the years 
of the life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrimage.” So the 
experience of Israel himself is summed up in the close of his life. 
Human cares, jealousies, sorrows, cast their shade over the scene 
— the golden dawn of the patriarchal age is overcast ; there is no 
longer the same unwavering faith ; we are no longer in com- 
munion with the “High Father,” the “ Friend of God;” we at 
times almost doubt whether we are not with his enemy. But for 
this very reason the interest attaching to Jacob, though of a less 
lofty and universal kind, is more touching, more penetrating, 
more attractive. Nothing but the perverse attempt to demand 
perfection of what is held before us as imperfect could blind us to 
the exquisite truthfulness which marks the delineation of the 
patriarch’s character. 

Look at him as his course is unrolled through the long vicissi- 
tudes which make his life a faithful mirror of human existence in 
its many aspects. Look at him as compared with his brother 
Esau. Unlike the sharp contrast of the earlier brothers of sacred 
i Newman’s Sermons. 



7 


97 


98 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


history, in these two the good and evil are so mingled that at 
first we might be at a loss which to follow, which to condemn. 
The distinctness with which they seem to stand and move before 
us against the clear distance is a new phase in the history. Esau, 
the shaggy, red-haired huntsman, the man of the field, with his 
arrows, his quiver and his bow, coming in weary from the chase, 
caught as with the levity and eagerness of a child by the sight of 
the lentile soup — “Feed me, I pray thee, with the red, red pot- 
tage” — yet so full of generous impulse, so affectionate toward his 
aged father, so forgiving toward his brother, so open-hearted, so 
chivalrous, — who has not at times felt his heart warm toward the 
poor rejected Esau, and been tempted to join with him as he cries 
with “a great and exceeding bitter cry,” “Hast thou but one 
blessing, my father? bless me, even me also, O my father!” 
And who does not in like manner feel at times his indignation 
swell against the younger brother ? “ Is he not rightly named 

Jacob, for he hath supplanted me these two times?” He entraps 
his brother, he deceives his father, he makes a bargain even in his 
prayer; in his dealings with Laban, in his meeting with Esau, 
he still calculates and contrives ; he distrusts his neighbors ; he 
treats with prudential caution the insult to his daughter and 
the cruelty of his sons; he hesitates to receive the assurance of 
Joseph’s good will ; he repels, even in his lesser traits, the free 
confidence that we cannot withhold from the patriarchs of the 
elder generation. 

But yet, taking the two from first to last, how entirely is the 
judgment of Scripture and the judgment of posterity confirmed 
by the result of the whole ! The mere impulsive hunter vanishes 
away, light as air : “ He did eat and drink, and rose up and went 
his way. Thus Esau despised his birthright.” The substance, 
the strength of the chosen family, the true inheritance of the 
promise of Abraham, was interwoven with the very essence of 
the character of the “plain man dwelling in tents” — steady, 
persevering, moving on with deliberate settled purpose, through 


JACOB. 


99 


years of suffering and prosperity, of exile and return, of bereave- 
ment and recovery. The birthright is always before him. Rachel 
is won from Laban by hard service, “ and the seven years seemed 
unto him but a few days for the love he had to her.” Isaac and 
Rebekah and Rebekah’s nurse are remembered with a faithful, 
filial remembrance; Joseph and Benjamin are long and pas- 
sionately loved with a more than parental affection, bringing 
down his gray hairs, for their sakes, “ in sorrow to the grave.” 
This is no character to be contemned or scoffed at; if it was en- 
compassed with much infirmity, yet its very complexity demands 
our reverent attention ; in it are bound up, as his double name 
expresses, not one man, but two ; by toil and struggle, Jacob, 
the supplanter, is gradually transformed into Israel, the prince 
of God ; the harsher and baser features are softened and purified 
away ; he looks back over his long career with the fullness of ex- 
perience and humility : “ I am not worthy of the least of all the 
mercies and of all the truth which thou hast showed unto thy ser- 
vant.” Alone of the patriarchal family his end is recorded as 
invested with the solemnity of warning and of prophetic song : 
“ Gather yourselves together, ye sons of Jacob, and hearken unto 
Israel your father.” We need not fear to acknowledge that the 
God of Abraham and the God of Isaac was also the God of 
Jacob. 

Most unworthy indeed should we be of the gift of the sacred 
narrative if we failed to appreciate it in this its full, its many- 
sided aspect. Even in the course of the Jewish history, what a 
foreshadowing of the future ! We may venture to trace in the 
wayward chieftain of Edom the likeness of the fickle, uncertain 
Edomite, now allied, now hostile, to the seed of promise; the 
wavering, unstable dynasty which came forth from Idumaea; 
Herod the magnificent and the cruel; Herod Antipas, who 
“ heard John gladly” and slew him; Herod Agrippa, “ almost 
a Christian” — half Jew and half heathen. “A turbulent and 
unruly race ” — so Josephus describes the Idumaeans of his day — 


100 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


“ always hovering on the verge of revolution, always rejoicing in 
changes, roused to arms by the slightest motion of flattery, rush- 
ing to battle as if they were going to a feast.” But we cannot 
mistake the type of the Israelites in him whom, beyond even 
Abraham and Isaac, they recognized as their father Israel. 
His doubtful qualities exactly recall to us the form of character 
which, even to a proverb, we call in scorn, “ Jewish.” By his 
peculiar discipline of exile and suffering, a true counterpart is 
produced of the special faults and special gifts known to us 
chiefly through his persecuted descendants in the Middle Ages. 
In Jacob we see the same timid, cautious watchfulness that we 
know so well, though under darker colors, through our great 
masters of fiction, in Shylock of Venice and Isaac of York. 
But no less, in the nobler side of his career, do we trace the 
germs of the unbroken endurance, the undying resolution, which 
keeps the nation alive still even in its present outcast condition, 
and which was the basis, in its brightest days, of the heroic zeal, 
long-suffering and hope of Moses, of David, of Jeremiah, of the 
Maccabees, of the twelve Jewish apostles and the first martyr 
Stephen. 

We cannot, however, narrow the lessons of Jacob’s history to 
the limits of the Israelite Church. All ecclesiastical history is 
the gainer by the sight of such a character so delineated. It is a 
character not all black nor all white, but checkered with the 
mixed colors which make up so vast a proportion of the double 
phases of the leaders of the Church and the world in every age. 
The neutrality (so to speak) of the Scripture narrative may be 
seen by its contrast with the dark hues in which Esau is painted 
by the Rabbinical authors. He is hindered in his chase by Satan ; 
hell opens as he goes in to his father ; he gives his father dogs’ 
flesh instead of venison ; he tries to bite Jacob on his return ; he 
commits five sins in one day. This is the difference between 
mere national animosity and the high impartial judgment of the 
sacred story, evenly balanced and steadily held, yet not regard- 


JACOB. 


101 


less of the complicated and necessary variations of human thought 
and action. For students of theology, for future pastors, for 
young men in the opening of life, what a series of lessons is 
opened in the history of these two youths, issuing from their 
father’s tent in Beersheba ! The free, easy, frank good nature 
of the profane Esau is not overlooked; the craft, duplicity, 
timidity, of the religious Jacob is duly recorded. Yet, on the 
one hand, fickleness, unsteadiness, weakness, want of faith and 
want of principle, ruin and render useless the noble qualities 
of the first; and on the other hand, steadfast purpose, resolute 
sacrifice of present to future, and fixed principle, purify, elevate, 
turn to lasting good even the baser qualities of the second. 
And yet again, whether in the two brothers or their descendants, 
we see how in each the good and evil strove together and worked 
their results almost to the end. Esau and his race cling still to 
the outskirts of the chosen people. “ Meddle not,” it was said 
in after times, “ with your brethren the children of Esau, for I 
will not give you of their land, because I have given Mount Seir 
to Esau for a possession.” Israel, on the other hand, is outcast, 
thwarted, deceived, disappointed, bereaved — “all these things are 
against me;” in him, and in his progeny also, the curse of Ebal 
is always blended with the blessings of Gerizim. How hardly 
Esau was condemned ! how hardly Jacob was saved ! We are 
kept in long and just suspense ; the prodigal may, as far as human 
eye can see, be on his way home ; the blameless son, who “ has 
been in his father’s house always,” may be shutting himself out. 
Yet the final issue to which, on the whole, this primitive history 
calls our attention, is the same which is borne out by the history 
of the Church even in these latter days of complex civilization. 
There is, after all, a weakness in selfish worldliness for which no 
occasional impulse can furnish any adequate compensation, even 
though it be the generosity of an Arabian chief or the inimitable 
good nature of an English king. There is a nobleness in prin- 
ciple and faith which cannot be wholly destroyed, even though it 


102 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


be marred by the hardness or the duplicity of the Jew or the 
Jesuit, or any other deceitful race. 

Jacob’s going out from Beersheba toward Haran is, if one may 
so say, the first retrograde movement in the history of the Church. 
Was the migration of Abraham to be reversed ? Was the west- 
ward tide of events to roll back upon itself? Was the chosen 
race to sink back into the life of Mesopotamian deserts ? But the 
first halt of the wanderer revealed his future destinies. “ The 
sun went down;” the night gathered round; he was on the 
central thoroughfare, on the hard back-bone of the mountains of 
Palestine ; the ground was strewn with wide sheets of bare rock ; 
here and there stood up isolated fragments like ancient Druidical 
monuments. On the hard ground he lay down for rest, and in 
the visions of the night the rough stones formed themselves into 
a vast staircase reaching into the depth of the wide and open sky, 
which, without any interruption of tent or tree, was stretched over 
the sleeper’s head. On that staircase were ascending and descend- 
ing the messengers of God, and from above there came the divine 
voice which told the houseless wanderer that, little as he thought 
it, he had a protector there and everywhere ; that even in this 
bare and open thoroughfare, in no consecrated grove or cave, 
“the Lord was in this place, though he knew it not.” “This 
was Bethel, the house of God, and this was the gate of heaven.” 

The monument, whatever it was, that was still in after ages 
ascribed to the erection of Jacob, must have been, like so many 
described or seen in other times and countries, a rude copy of the 
natural features of the place, as at Carraac in Brittany, the crom- 
lechs of Wales or Cornwall, or the walls of Tiryus, where the 
play of nature and the simplicity of art are almost undistin- 
guishable. In all ages of primitive history, such monuments 
are, if we may so call them, the earliest ecclesiastical edifices. 
In Greece there were rude stones at Delphi still visible in the 
second century, anterior to any temple, and, like the rock of 
Bethel, anointed with oil by the pilgrims who came thither. In 


JACOB. 


103 


Northern Africa, Arnobius, after his conversion, describes the 
kind of fascination which had drawn him toward one of these 
aged stones, streaming and shining with the sacred oil which had 
been poured upon it. The black stone of the Arabian Caaba 
reaches back to the remotest antiquity of which history or tra- 
dition can speak. 

In all these rough anticipations of a fixed structure or build- 
ing, we trace the beginnings of what in the case of Jacob is first 
distinctly called “ Bethel,” the house of God, “ the place of wor- 
ship” — the a Beit-allah” of Mecca, the “Bastulia” of the early 
Phoenician worship. When we see the rude remains of Abury 
in England, there is a strange interest in the thought that 
they are the first architectural witness of English religion. 
Even so the pillar or cairn or cromlech of Bethel must have 
been looked upon by the Israelites, and may still be looked 
upon in thought by us, as the precursor of every “ house of God” 
that has since arisen in the Jewish or Christian world — the 
temple, the cathedral, the church, the chapel — nay, more, of 
those secret places of worship that are marked by no natural 
beauty and seen by no human eye — the closet, the catacomb, the 
thoroughfare, of the true worshiper. There was neither in the 
aspect nor in the ground of Bethel any religio loci y but the place 
was no less u dreadful” — full of awe. The stone of Bethel re- 
mained as the memorial that an all-encompassing Providence 
watches over its chosen instruments, however unconscious at the 
time of what and where the} 7 are. u The Shepherd, the Stone 
of Israel,” was one of the earliest names by which the God 
of Jacob was known. The vision of the way reaching from 
heaven to earth received its highest application in a divine mani- 
festation yet more universal and unexpected. Not in the temple 
or on the high priest, but on the despised Nazarene, the Son of 
man, was Nathanael to see the fulfillment of Jacob’s vision — 
“the angels of God ascending” into the open heaven, and “de- 
scending” on the common earth. 


104 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


The chief interest of the story of Jacob’s twenty years’ service 
with Laban lies in its reopening of the relations between the 
settlers in Palestine and the original tribe of Mesopotamia, which 
appeared on Abraham’s migration to have been closed. “ Then 
Jacob ‘ lifted up his feet’ and came into the land of the ‘ children’ 
of the east. And he looked, and behold a well in the field ; and 
lo ! three flocks of sheep lying by it, and a great stone was on 
the well’s mouth.” The shepherds were there; they had ad- 
vanced far away from “ the city of Nahor.” It was not the well 
outside the walls, with the hewn staircase, down which Rebekah 
descended with the pitcher on her head. Rachel comes, guiding 
her father’s flocks, like the daughter of the Bedouin chiefs at the 
present day, and Jacob claims the Bedouin right of cousinship : 
“ And it came to pass when Jacob saw Rachel, the daughter of 
Laban his mother’s brother, and the sheep of Laban his mother’s 
brother” — observe the simplicity of the juxtaposition — “that 
Jacob went near and rolled the stone from the well’s mouth, and 
watered the flock of Laban his mother’s brother; and Jacob 
kissed Rachel, and lifted up his voice and wept.” Then begins 
the long contest of cunning and perseverance, in which true love 
wins the game at last against selfish gains. Seven years, the ser- 
vice of a slave, thrice over, did Jacob pay. He is the faithful 
Eastern “good shepherd;” that which was torn of beasts he 
brought not unto his master; he bare the loss of it; of his hand 
“did his hard taskmaster” require it, whether stolen by day or 
stolen by night; in the day the drought “of the desert” con- 
sumed him, and the frost in the cold Eastern nights, “and his 
sleep departed from him.” In Edessa was laid up for many 
centuries what professed to be the tent in which he had guarded 
his master’s flocks. And at last his fortunes were built up ; the 
slave became a prince, and the second migration took place from 
Mesopotamia into Palestine, “ with much cattle, i with male and 
female slaves,’ with camels and with asses.” 

It was the termination of the dark and uncertain prelude of 


JACOB. 


105 


Jacob’s life. He is now the exile returning home after years of 
wandering. He is the chief, raised by his own efforts and God’s 
providence to a high place amongst the tribes of the earth. He 
stands like Abraham on the heights of Bethel, like Moses on 
the heights of Pisgah, overlooking from the watch-tower, “ the 
Mizpeh” of Gilead, the whole extent of the land which is to be 
called after his name. The deep valley of the Jordan, stretched 
below, recalls the mighty change of fortune : “ With my staff I 
passed over this Jordan, and now I am become two bands.” The 
wide descent of the valley southward toward the distant moun- 
tains of Seir reminds him of the contest which may be in store 
for him from the advancing tribe of his brother of Edom. But 
the story sets before us a deeper than any mere external change 
or struggle. It is as though the twenty years of exile and servi- 
tude had wrought their work. Every incident and word is 
fraught with a double meaning; in every instance earthly and 
spiritual images are put one over against the other, hardly to be 
seen in our English version, but in the original clearly intended. 
Other forms than his own company are surrounding him ; another 
face than that of his brother Esau is to welcome his return to the 
land of his birth and kindred. He was become two “ bands” or 
“ hosts ;” he had divided his people, his flocks and herds and 
camels, into two “hosts;” he had sent “messengers” before to 
announce his approach. But as Jacob went on his way, the 
“ messengers” of God met him, as when he had seen them ascend- 
ing and descending the stair of heaven at Bethel; and “when 
Jacob saw them, he said, This is God’s host, and he called the 
name of that place Mahanaim” — that is, “The two hosts.” The 
name was handed on to after ages, and the place became the 
sanctuary of the Transjordanic tribes. He was still on the 
heights of the Transjordanic hills beyond the deep defile where 
the Jabbok — as its name implies — “wrestles” with the moun- 
tains through which it descends to the Jordan. In the dead of 
night he sent his wives and his sons and all that he had across 


106 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


the defile, and he was left alone; and in the darkness and still- 
ness, in the crisis of his life, in the agony of his fear for the issue 
of the morrow, there “wrestled” with him one whose name he 
knew not until the dawn rose over the hills of Gilead. They 
“wrestled,” and he prevailed, yet not without bearing away 
marks of the conflict. He is saved, as elsewhere in his whole 
career, so here — “ saved, yet so as by fire.” In that struggle, in 
that seal and crown of his life, he wins his new name : “ Thy 
name shall be called no more Jacob, 1 the supplanter/ but Israel, 
‘ the prince of God/ for as a prince hast thou power with God 
and with man, and hast prevailed.” The dark, crafty character 
of the youth, though never wholly lost — for “Jacob” he still 
was called to the end of his days — has been by trial and affliction 
changed into the princelike, godlike character of his manhood. 
And what was he with whom he had wrestled in the visions 
of the night, and who had vanished from his grasp as the day 
was breaking? “Tell me, I pray thee, thy name. And he said, 
AVlierefore is it that thou dost ask after my name? And he 
blessed him there, and Jacob called the name of the place Peniel 
(that is, ‘the face of God*), for I have seen God face to face, and 
my life is preserved.” And as he passed over Penuel, the sun, 
of which the dawn had been already breaking, “burst” upon 
him, and he “ halted upon his thigh.” 

The dreaded meeting with Esau has passed ; the two brothers 
retain their characters throughout the interview — the generosity 
of the one and the caution of the other. And for the last time 
Esau retires to make room for Jacob ; he leaves to him the land 
of his inheritance, and disappears on his way to the wild moun- 
tains of Seir. In those wild mountains, in the red hills of Edom, 
in the caves and excavations to which the soft sandstone rocks so 
readily lend themselves, in the cliffs which afterward gave to the 
settlement the name of “Sela” or “Petra,” lingered the ancient 
aboriginal tribe of the Horites or dwellers in the holes of the 
rock. These “the children of Esau succeeded, and destroyed 


JA COB. 


107 


from before them, and dwelt in their stead.” It was the rough 
rocky country described in their father’s blessing : “ Behold, 
thy dwelling shall be the fatness of the earth and of the dew of 
heaven ;” by the sword they were to live ; a race of hunters 
among the mountains; their nearest allies, the Arabian tribe 
Nebaioth. Petra, the mysterious secluded city, with its thousand 
caves, is the lasting monument of their local habitation. 

So we part from the house of Esau and return to the latter 
days of Jacob. He, too, moves onward. From the summit of 
Mount Gerizim the eye rests on the wide opening in the eastern 
hills beyond the Jordan which marks the issue of the Jabbok 
into the Jordan valley. Through that opening, straight toward 
Gerizim and Shechem, Jacob descends “ in peace and triumph.” 

At every stage of his progress henceforward we are reminded 
that it is the second and not the first settlement of Palestine that 
is now unfolding itself. It is no longer, as in the case of Abra- 
ham, the purely pastoral life; it is the gradual transition from 
the pastoral to the agricultural. Jacob, on his first descent from 
the downs of Gilead, is no longer a mere dweller in tents; he 
“ builds him an house;” he makes u booths” or “ huts” for his 
cattle, and therefore the name of the place is called “Succoth.” 
He advances across the Jordan ; he comes to Shechem in the 
heart of Palestine, whither Abraham had come before him. But 
it is no longer the uninhabited “ place” and grove; it is “the 
city” of Shechem, and “before the city” his tent is pitched. 
And he comes not merely as an Arabian wanderer, but as with 
fixed aim and fixed habitation in view. He sets his eye on the 
rich plain which stretches eastward of the city, now, as eighteen 
hundred years ago, and then, as twenty centuries before, “ white 
already to the harvest” with its waving cornfields. This, and 
not a mere sepulchre like the cave of Machpelah, is the possession 
which he purchases from the inhabitants of the land. The very 
pieces of money with which he buys the land are not merely 
weighed, as in the bargain with Ephron ; they are stamped with 


108 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


the earliest mark of coinage — the figure of the lambs of the flocks. 
In this vale of Shechem the patriarch rests, as in a permanent 
home. Beersheba, Hebron, even Bethel, are nothing to him in 
comparison with this one chosen portion which is to descend to 
his favorite son. 

It is with the latest portion of Jacob’s life that are most clearly 
interwoven those cords of natural and domestic affection which so 
bind his name round our hearts. He revisits then his old haunts 
at Bethel and Beersheba. The ancient servant of his house, Deb- 
orah, his mother’s nurse, the only link which survived between 
him and the face which he should see no more, dies, and is not 
forgotten, but is buried beneath the hill of Bethel, under the oak 
well known to the many who passed that way in later times as 
Allonbachuth (“the oak of tears”). They draw near to a place 
then known only by its ancient Canaanite name, and now for 
the first time mentioned in history — “ Ephratah, which is Beth- 
lehem.” The village appears spread along its narrow ridge, but 
they are not to reach it. “ There was but a little way to come 
to Ephrath, and Rachel travailed, and she had hard labor. 
And it came to pass, as her soul was in departing — for she died — 
that she called the name of the child Ben-oni (that is, ‘ the son of 
sorrow’); but his father called him Ben-jamin (that is, ‘the son 
of my right hand’). And Rachel died and was buried in the. 
way to Ephrath. And Jacob set a pillar on her grave, that is 
the pillar of Rachel’s grave unto this day.” The pillar has long 
disappeared, but her memory long remained. She still lived on 
in Joseph’s dreams. Her name still clung to the nuptial bene- 
diction of the villagers of Bethlehem. After the allotment of 
the country to the several tribes, the territory of the Benjamites 
was extended to a long strip far into the south, to include the 
sepulchre of their beloved ancestress. When the infants of Beth- 
lehem were slaughtered by Herod, it seemed to the Evangelist as 
though the voice of Rachel were heard weeping for her children 
from her neighboring grave. 


JACOB. 


109 


In the mixture of agricultural and pastoral life which now 
gathers around him is laid the train of the last and most touch- 
ing incidents of Jacob’s story. It is whilst they are feeding their 
father’s flocks together that the fatal envy arises against the 
favorite son. It is whilst they are binding the sheaves in the 
well-known cornfield that Joseph’s sheaf stands upright in his 
dream. On the confines of the same field at Shechem the brothers 
were feeding their flocks when Joseph was sent from Hebron to 
“ see whether it were well with his brethren and well with the 
flocks, and to bring his father word again.” And from Shechem 
he followed them to the two wells of Dothan, in the passes of 
Manasseh, when the caravan of Arabian merchants passed by 
and he disappeared from his father’s eyes. His history belongs 
henceforth to a wider sphere. The glimpse of Egypt, opened up 
to us for a moment in the life of Abraham, now spreads into a 
vast and permanent prospect. 

The story of the descent into Egypt, too simple to need any 
elaborate elucidation, is a fitting close to the life of Jacob. Once 
more he is to set forth on his pilgrimage. He came to the frontier 
plain of Beersheba ; he received the assurance that beyond that 
frontier he was to descend yet farther into Egypt. He “ went 
down ” from the steppes to Beersheba ; he crossed the desert and 
met his son on the border of the cultivated land ; he was brought 
into the presence of the great Pharaoh ; he saw his race estab- 
lished in the land of Egypt. And then the time drew near that 
Israel must die, and his one thought, oftentimes repeated, was 
that his bones should not rest in that strange land, not in pyramid 
or painted chamber, but in the cell that he had “ digged for him- 
self” in the primitive sepulchre of his fathers. So his body was 
embalmed after the manner of the Egyptians, and a vast funeral 
procession bore it away, the asses and the camels of the pastoral 
tribe mingling with the chariots and horsemen characteristic of 
Egypt. They came — so the narrative seems to imply — not by 
the direct road which the patriarchs had hitherto traversed on 


110 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


their way to Egypt by El-Arish, but round the long circuit by 
which Moses afterward led their descendants till they arrived on 
the banks of the Jordan. Farther than this the Egyptian escort 
came not. But the valley of the Jordan resounded with loud, 
shrill lamentations peculiar to their ceremonial of mourning, and 
with the funeral games with which, then as now, the Arabs en- 
circle the tomb of a departed chief. From this double tradition 
the spot was known in after times as “the meadow” or “the 
mourning” of the Egyptians (Abel- Mizr aim), and as Beth-hogla 
(“the house of the encircling dance”). “And his sons carried 
him into the land of Canaan, and buried him in the cave of the 
held of Machpelah. And Joseph returned into Egypt, he and 
all his brethren, and all that went up with him, after he had 
buried his father.” 




VII. 

JOSEPH. 

HATEVER way we turn a diamond, it flashes out rays 
of light of various hues, but all exquisitely beautiful. 
Such a gem is the story of Joseph. Indeed, it is in 
many respects unique. A universal favorite, one over 
which gentle childhood bends with interest and venerable age 
with tears, it is in some respects as unrivaled in the Bible as the 
Bible is unrivaled among books. 

Regarded only as a literary composition, with what inimitable 
beauty and pathos is the story told ! In Jacob’s doting love for 
the motherless boy, the first-born of his beloved Rachel ; in the 
wildness of that grief the bloody cloak awoke, and sons and 
daughters rose in vain to comfort ; in the rebound of his feelings 
at the news from Egypt, from the unbelief that heard them as too 
good to be true, to the vehement emotion that burst out in the 
cry, “ Joseph my son is yet alive, I will go and see him before I 
die ;” in the wakening up of the consciences, the dread and the 
remorse of the guilty brothers; in the trembling question, “Is 
your father well, the old man of whom ye spake? is he yet 
alive?” in the tender recollections that woke at the sight of Ben- 
jamin, and sent Joseph to another chamber to preserve his dis- 
guise and relieve his heart by a flood of tears ; in that matchless 
address of Judah when, making us forget his crimes and mingle 
our tears with his, he pleaded for the old man’s sake, and offered 
himself a ransom for the trembling boy; and in the events that 

ill 



112 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


immediately followed the disclosure, when, unable any longer to 
restrain his feelings, Joseph tore off the mask, and crying, “I am 
Joseph, your brother,” broke out into such a burst of passionate 
emotion that his weeping was heard throughout all the house, — 
in these there are touches of nature which the greatest iminspired 
genius never approached — so fine, so true, so tender, that no man 
of ordinary sensibility could read the story aloud but his tongue 
would falter and his eyes be dimmed with tears. 

Considered simply as a story, what novel paints scenes more 
interesting or relates events so picturesque and romantic? To 
apply a common expression to this portion of sacred Scripture, 
it is u eminently sensational ” — that is, abounds in passages 
which excite interest, deeply stir the emotions, warm and draw 
out the affections, equally with those highly-seasoned tales 
which so largely feed the public appetite. Yet how much they 
differ! Its details are true, while theirs are false; and while 
their tendency is to debase rather than improve the taste or 
purify the heart, the history of Joseph recommends itself, as I 
hope to show, by its lofty morality, the spirit of piety wdiich it 
breathes and the lessons of wisdom which it teaches. Seek 
stories that rouse and sustain our interest by remarkable vicissi- 
tudes of fortune, the play of lights and shadows, sudden alterna- 
tions of sunshine and of storm, scenes both of the wildest grief 
and of ecstatic joy, hairbreadth escapes from horrid crimes, from 
pit and prison and deadly perils, where shall we find one to com-' 
pare with Joseph's? No man I ever read of had such experience 
of the vicissitudes of life, passed unscathed through so many 
strange and fiery trials, met with deliverances so signal, or had 
more apparent cause to doubt, and in the end more real cause to 
acknowledge, a presiding providence and the goodness of God. 

Passed in quiet studies or domestic duties or the routine of 
business, and in the common walks of piety, there are many good 
lives that would make very dull books. Hence, though their 
works may be published, and are such that the world would not 


JOSEPH. 


113 


willingly allow to perish, some great men have found no biog- 
raphers. Their lives lacked stirring incidents, being marked by 
none but such as are common to humanity. But while their 
lives resembled some rich but level country, where cottages stand 
embowered amid smiling orchards, and village spires and castle 
towers rise above umbrageous woods, and fields wave with boun- 
teous harvests, and fat herds slake their thirst at streams which 
flow between sedgy banks quietly to the sea, the life of Joseph is 
eminently picturesque. It resembles the scenes that lend their 
charms to the Alps or Apennines, where the thundering cataract 
and foaming torrent alternate with lakes that lie asleep in the 
arms of beauty, where frowning crags look down on flowery 
meadows, and deep dark valleys are parted by mountains whose 
peaks pierce the azure sky, and glistening with eternal snows* 
seem to bear up the vault of heaven. 

The interest of such scenes and the pleasure they afford are much 
enhanced if religion lends them her dignity, and their physical is 
associated with circumstances of moral grandeur. Such is the 
case, for example, in the grand valleys of Piedmont, the moun- 
tain-home of the Waldenses, where their fathers prayed and 
fought for three long centuries — so persecuted by bloody papists 
that, as one of their historians says, “ every rock became a monu- 
ment, every meadow saw executions and every village had its roll 
of martyrs.” Even so the interest of Joseph’s story deepens 
when, penetrating beneath the surface, we discover in him a type 
of Christ, and see how many of the events of his life appear to 
foreshadow some of the leading incidents in our Saviour’s. Many 
are the points of resemblance in the histories of Joseph and of 
Jesus. This may be, so to speak, more of accident than inten- 
tion, yet the analogies between the two are remarkable, and will 
interest and instruct us, if they do nothing more. 

Both were the beloved sons of their fathers. Both were envied 
and hated of their brethren. Both were the victims of base con- 
spirators. Both had a remarkable garment, and were stripped 
8 


114 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


of it by cruel hands. Both, though innocent, were accused of the 
foulest crimes. Both were tempted to great sins, and both alike 
recoiled from and repelled the tempters — the “ Get thee behind 
me, Satan !” of Jesus recalling Joseph’s words when, starting 
back, horror sitting on his face, he protested, saying, “ How can 
I do this great wickedness and sin against God ?” Both were 
•slain — the one in fact, the other in intention. Both not only for- 
gave, but saved, their murderers. In both cases these “ thought 
evil, but God meant it unto good.” Joseph’s burial in the pit is 
a symbol of Christ’s in the tomb. He comes from both pit and 
prison a type of Him whom death could not hold in his grasp, 
nor the grave in her ancient fetters. And in that young Hebrew 
whom Pharaoh calls from a prison to the palace that he may in- 
vest him with imperial authority and commit into his hands the 
management of his kingdom — in the words of Scripture, to put 
his seal on his hand, to array him in vesture of fine linen, to put 
a gold chain upon his neck, to make him ride in the second 
chariot which he had, to send heralds before him, crying, “ Bow 
the knee!” — we see Jesus. Here is a type and shadow of our 
glorified and ascended Lord as he stands at the right hand of 
God, and at the mandate, “Let all the angels of God worship 
him,” ten times ten thousand fall prostrate at his feet. From 
Egypt’s streets and palace we are carried away to the celestial 
city — to the scene where the four living creatures, and the four- 
and-twenty elders, with harps and golden vials full of odors, 
which are the prayers of saints, fall down before the Lamb, and 
sing the new song, saying, “ Thou art worthy to take the book, 
and to open the seals thereof; for thou wast slain, and hast re- 
deemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, 
and people, and nation.” 

In leaving such sacred and lofty topics for that feature of 
Joseph’s life which makes him a type of the successful man , it may 
appear that I am making a great descent. Success is not always 
another term for merit and worth, for excellence of conduct and 


JOSEPH. 


115 


nobleness of character. But however some may have climbed up 
by foul means, marking their path with slime, so did not this 
child, not of fortune, but of God. While its success is one of the 
most remarkable features of Joseph’s career, it was won, with 
God’s blessing, by those virtues which form the true foundations 
of a happy, useful and successful life. It may be to our profit 
and advantage to consider his history in this light. Promising 
before we part to trace his success to these, and draw from his 
career some useful lessons, let me now ask my readers to look at 
him as the very type and model of a successful man. 

The heathens had a goddess whom they called Fortune. She 
is commonly represented standing by a wheel. From this, which 
she turns round and round, are drawn the blanks and prizes in 
which she assigns their different destinies to men, without any 
respect whatever to their merits and demerits. She could not do 
otherwise, indeed ; for while her hand is on the wheel, a bandage 
is on her eyes. So all things fall out by chance — blind and 
^discriminating chance — a man who deserves a prize often re- 
ceiving a blank, while success falls to the lot of such as, indolent 
and unworthy, have no claim to reward. 

No picture of the world could be more fallacious. Dethroning 
God, it denies a superintending Providence, and reducing every- 
thing to blind fate and chaotic confusion, it makes man the sport 
of elements over which neither he nor any one else has the least 
control. In its practical influence this doctrine must be emi- 
nently pernicious. It weakens, or rather destroys, all the springs 
of activity, and furnishes sloth and self-indulgence and vice itself 
with a too acceptable excuse. 

Unchristian as it is, this old heathen notion is still, to some 
extent, current among us. This may be owing to those occa- 
sional cases where we see success attending such as appear to 
have done nothing to deserve it, and where, on the other hand, 
we see meritorious men outstripped by inferior rivals. From 
such cases we, ignorant of all the circumstances, are apt to draw 


116 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


too hasty conclusions, looking on them with the gioomy eyes of 
him who complained, “ I returned and saw under the sun that 
the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither 
yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, 
nor yet favor to men of skill : but time and chance happeneth to 
all.” Account for it as we may, Fortune, though she has no 
temple, has still her worshipers. More than would be willing to 
confess it trust not a little to chance. Reckless or lazy, they 
hope that something will turn up ; and to how great an extent 
the old heathen notion exists and keeps its hold of men crops 
out in the terms so frequently applied to one whose career has 
been signalized by remarkable success. He is called a child of 
fortune — a favorite of fortune. 

The ideas these terms convey are quite illusory, and calculated 
to have a most prejudicial effect on the minds especially of the 
young — of those who have the work and battle of life before 
them. Not more impious and less pernicious was the idea ex- 
pressed in the speech of a Norseman — one of that brave, indomi- 
table, self-reliant, battle-fighting, sea-subduing, adventurous race, 
to whose blood flowing in their veins Britons owe their enterprise, 
the energy which has won brilliant victories in fight and planted 
prosperous colonies in all quarters of the globe. Bringing to the 
work of life an indomitable energy, compelling the winds that 
blew around and the waves that thundered on his stormy shores 
to waft him on to fortune, the old pagan — a skillful seaman, a 
dauntless soldier, one who had cultivated with equal success the 
arts of peace and war — is reported to have said, “I believe 
neither in idols nor in demons : I put all my trust in my strength 
of body and of soul.” What a contrast to his bold atheism, and 
also to their confidence who trust in the blind throws of for- 
tune, the language of the pious Psalmist ! — “ God is my strength 
and power, and he maketh my way perfect. He teacheth my 
hands to war, so that a bow of steel is broken by mine arms. 
Thou hast also given me the shield of thy salvation, and thy 


JOSEPH , ; 


m 


gentleness hath made me great. The Lord liveth, and blessed 
be my rock ; and exalted be the God of the rock of my salva- 
tion.” Equally enlightened and devout were the sentiments of 
Joseph. A divine Providence is gratefully acknowledged in the 
very names of his children. He calls his first-born Manasseh, 
saying, “For God hath made me forget all my toil, and all my 
father’s house ;” and enshrining the same acknowledgment in the 
name of his second, he calls him Ephraim, “ for God,” he said, 
hath caused me to be fruitful in the land of my affliction.” 

These cases — that of David and this of Joseph — present, it may 
be admitted, such remarkable changes of fortune as to constrain 
the dullest to acknowledge Him who setteth up one and putteth 
down another. But on the other hand such cases are, it may be 
said, so rare that they can furnish- no proper stimulus to exertion. 
By no means. It is not uncommon for men to rise from ob- 
scurity to fame and fortune if, denying themselves and exerting 
their energies to the utmost, they seize the opportunities Provi- 
dence presents and our great English dramatist describes, saying, 

11 There is a tide in the affairs of men, 

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” 

For example, what circumstances apparently more desperate, 
some twenty years ago, than his who now rules France and holds 
the destinies of Europe in his hands ? 1 Then an exile, a home- 
less wanderer, he was indulging in visions of conquest which ex- 
cited only the pity of women and the scorn of sensible men. Yet 
improbable as once it seemed, his dream has come to pass — come 
true as his who, in brethren on their knees at his feet, saw the 
sheaves of a boyish dream bending to his. History proves what 
men, for their encouragement, would do well to remember — that 
there is no trade nor position, however humble, from which, God 
favoring them, some have not climbed the ladder at the heels, 
though not perhaps to the height, of Joseph. 

For example, John Bunyan was originally a tinker ; Faraday, 
1 Written before the fall of Napoleon III. 


118 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


the celebrated chemist, a bookbinder ; the inventor of the steam- 
engine, a blacksmith; John Foster, whose writings will live with 
our tongue, a weaver ; Cook, the distinguished navigator, a day- 
laborer ; Carey, the first of missionaries, a cobbler ; Hugh Miller, 
a mason; while Jeremy Taylor, Arkwright, the founder of our 
cotton manufactures, and Tenterden, the great lord chief-justice 
of England, issued from barbers’ shops. And in less famous 
spheres our merchants and men of commerce present equally re- 
markable examples of the success that rewards industry and 
exertion. How many of them have entered the towns where 
they laid the foundation and built up the fabric of gigantic for- 
tunes as poor as the lonely wanderer who crossed the fords of 
J ordan with only a staff in his hand ! 

The foundations of Joseph’s fortune, the steps by which he 
rose from slavery, the pit and the prison, to be the second man 
in Egypt, were not essentially different from that wisdom and 
self-denial and self-control and energy of character by which, 
with sound principles and God’s blessing, many have com- 
manded, and others may still command, a brilliant success. 
This I will show. I would meanwhile remark that the world 
has seldom seen such a rapid and great change of fortune. Hot 
incredible, the story is yet so improbable that we might have 
scrupled to receive it on any but divine authority. He would be 
a bold novelist who would venture to weave some of its incidents 
into the pages of a romance. 

In his early loss of a tender mother ; in the malignant hatred 
of his brothers ; in his sudden change from the fond caresses of 
an indulgent father to the blows and tears and chains of slavery ; 
in the vindictive persecution of his mistress ; in suffering, though 
innocent, the penalty of guilt ; in years of weary and long im- 
prisonment; in the sense of injustice and cruel wrong; in the 
hope deferred that maketh the heart sick; in the prospect of 
wasting his youth and closing his unhappy days, unknown and 
unpitied, within the bars of a prison, — no man was more unfor- 


JOSEPH. 


119 


ianate. Yet in whose history was the hand of Providence more 
visible ! What perils — more formidable than these, what tempta- 
tions — he escaped ! Plis doom is to be slain — fate more horrible, 
to be starved to death, to pine away of hunger in the bottom of a 
darksome pit, with no ear to hear his moans nor hand to lend 
him help, yet he escapes. He is a slave, yet what slave so for- 
tunate ? — he is sold to a master who appreciates his worth, and 
bestows on the bondsman a confidence which few freemen enjoy. 
He is a prisoner, but the frowns of fortune are changed to smiles. 
He wins the regard of his jailer, and rises into an office of trust. 
Strange man, he is never down but ere long he is up again, rising 
like a life-buoy which, buried under a mountain of water, is soon 
riding triumphant on the top of the waves. Twice he is rescued 
from imminent death. Twice he escapes what seems hopeless 
imprisonment. The very cause that threw him down becomes a 
ladder by which he climbs to fortune — one dream consigns him 
to the pit, and another raises him to the palace. 

What a revolution in his fate within the brief space of a single 
day ! It had made other men dizzy. He exchanges a captive’s 
chain for ornaments of gold, the prison garb for courtly vesture, 
the narrow walls of a jail for crowded streets through which, 
amid acclaims that rend the skies, he is borne in a royal chariot, 
heralds in advance opening the way and crying, “ Bow the 
knee!” He was Potiphar’s slave; he has become Potiphar’s 
lord. He begged favors of a butler; the proudest princes of 
Egypt now live in his smiles and tremble at his frown. His 
word is law, his countenance is sunshine; and if we might 
make the comparison, as God, bestowing all grace through his 
beloved Son, says to sinners and suppliants, “Go to Jesus,” Pha- 
raoh, constituting Joseph the channel and minister and dispenser 
of his royal favors, refers all affairs to him, saying, as we are told 
he said, “Go to Joseph.” And thus in Joseph, once entreating 
cruel brothers for his life, once toiling through the desert sands, 
a lonely, weeping, captive boy, but now surrounded with royal 


120 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


state, now married into a princely house, now the governor of 
Egypt, now the second man in the kingdom, now honored by 
the highest, loved by the humblest and regarded by all, from 
the monarch on his throne to the peasant that ploughed his field 
under the shadows of the pyramids and on the green banks of 
the Nile, as the saviour and benefactor of the land, — in this suc- 
cessful man we see, perhaps, the most remarkable illustration of 
the words of Solomon, “Seest thou a man diligent in business? 
he shall stand before kings, he shall not stand before mean men.” 

Let us now trace Joseph’s success to its sources. They were 
two : 

1. It was due to God. The sun — for long time acknowledged 
to be the centre around which all the planets roll — is coming to 
be regarded also as the main source of those forces which, under 
different forms, play their different parts in the world. To him, 
for instance, the wheel on which some dashing stream flings itself, 
by its impetus and weight turning the grindstones of the mill or 
the whirring spindles of the factory, owes its power. It was his 
heat which raised the waters of the sea into vapor ; floating in 
the realms of air, this vapor was condensed into clouds, and these 
descended in the rain which, gathered by a thousand rills into 
stream and river, sets all the wheels in motion. Not less to the 
sun we owe the wonders achieved by steam — our rapid flight on 
the iron rails, the victories it wins on the deep, the gigantic arms 
it moves in our service and at our bidding, where fires blaze and 
tall chimneys smoke. No doubt the moving force is, in the first 
instance, steam, but the steam is due to the fires of the furnace, 
and the fires of the furnace are maintained by the fuel it devours, 
and the fuel, whether wood of forests or coal from the bowels of 
earth, originally derived all its heat from the sun, wood and coal 
being magazines of sunbeams. This holds equally true of animal 
as of mechanical forces. The tiger leaps, the eagle soars, the 
elephant treads the forest with imperial foot, the fisherman pulls 
his oar, and the blacksmith swings his hammer on the sounding 


JOSEPH. 


121 


forge — all, man and beast, by virtue of a force that descended 
from the skies. The strength, for example, of man’s arm lies in 
its muscles ; their strength we owe to our food ; our food we owe 
to the earth ; and its fruits owe their existence and nutritive 
properties to that sun whose heat and light clothe the naked soil 
with verdant pastures and the fields with their golden harvests. 

By following a corresponding process, we would be conducted 
through many an intervening step to God himself, as the great 
final cause of all things and events. Universal Lord, Maker and 
Ruler of all, he is in all and over all ; so that there is a sense in 
which not Joseph’s fortunes only, but all things, are due to him. 
The life of angels, he is also the life of insects. The planets are 
rolled through space by the same hand that shapes every leaf and 
paints the humblest flower; and as “ without him nothing was 
made that is made,” so without him nothing happens that does 
happen, whether it be the fall of a kingdom or of a sparrow. 

The footprints of a man are not more visible on the surface of 
new-fallen snow than are the proofs of a divine power and 
presence throughout all the kingdom of Nature; nor is there 
need to quote Scripture to prove and adduce crimes to illustrate 
our depravity, and how the “ carnal mind is enmity against 
God,” so long as we have philosophers, so called, who refer 
everything to mere material agencies, and excluding all recog- 
nition of a supreme Intelligence, recall these words of an 
apostle: “The world by wisdom knew not God.” 

What are the laws of nature for the sake of which God is 
thrust from his imperial throne, disowned and dishonored by the 
creatures of his hand ? Law presupposes a law-maker — a mind 
to foresee the end and the appointment of means adequate to 
bring it about — to secure its accomplishment. And just as the 
laws of our country — to borrow a figure from society — are the 
expressions of the will of Parliament, what are the laws of 
nature, properly defined and traced to their native source, but 
the expression and outgoing of the will of God ? That will, like 


122 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


ours, works through the instrumentality of means; and “it is 
curious,” says the duke of Argyll, in a profound and subtile 
book which he has published, called “The Eeign of Law,” 
“ how the language of the grand seers of the Old Testament cor- 
responds with this idea. They uniformly ascribe all the opera- 
tions of nature — the greatest and the smallest — to the working 
of divine power. But they never revolt — as so many do in these 
weaker days — from the idea of this power working by wisdom 
and knowledge in the use of means, nor in this point of view do 
they ever separate between the work of creation and the work 
which is going on daily in the existing world. Exactly the 
same language is applied to the rarest exertions of power and to 
the gentlest and most constant of all natural operations. Thus, 
the saying that ‘ the Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth ; 
by understanding hath he established the heavens/ is coupled in 
the same breath with this other saying : ‘ By his knowledge the 
depths are broken up, and the clouds drop down the dew.’ ” 
The Bible furnishes many other illustrations of this, important 
remark of our noble author, one of which may be quoted for the 
beauty of its poetry and for its correct and scientific theory of 
rain. “ Seek him,” says the prophet Amos, “ that maketh the 
seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the 
morning, and maketh the day dark with night; that calleth the 
waters of the sea and poureth them out on the face of the earth : 
the Lord is his name.” 

But while there is thus a sense in which all things may be 
attributed to God, and a sense even in which “he made the 
wicked for the day of evil,” Joseph’s history furnishes examples 
of special providence — if not of miraculous, of very marvelous as 
well as manifest, interpositions of God. “ Who knoweth,” said 
Mordecai to Esther, when urging that noble woman to risk life 
and all for the sake of her people — “ who knoweth whether thou 
art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” The special 
providence which seemed, though probable, still problematical to 


JOSEPH. 


123 


Mordecai in Esther’s fortunes, no man can doubt, held the helm 
2>f Joseph’s. Though somewhat like the course of a boat, now 
riding upon the top of the waves and now lost in the trough of 
the sea, or like that of a traveler crossing a mountain region, who 
now stands on sunny heights and anon descends into the sombre 
depths of valleys, Joseph’s course, with many ups and downs, 
goes right to its mark — from the point where he starts to the 
goal he reaches. How manifest is it in his case that a divine 
eye — none else could — saw the end from the beginning! By 
what a special providence did all the vicissitudes of his checkered 
life — those things men call accidents — like successive waves, bear 
him on and up to the position where he accomplished his singular 
destiny, saving his family, and through them the hope of the 
Messiah ! What hand but one divine could have forged the 
chain which linked long years together — the sheepfolds of Hebron 
with the proud palaces of Egypt — the dreams of the boy with the 
deeds of the man ? To take up but its principal links : he dreams, 
and becomes in consequence the object of his brothers’ hatred ; 
through their hatred he is sold into slavery ; through slavery he 
enters the house of Potiphar ; through events that happen in that 
house he is consigned to prison ; in the prison he meets with one 
of Pharaoh’s servants; in consequence of interpreting the ser- 
vant’s dream he is summoned to interpret his master’s ; and that , 
the last link of a chain which has its first far away in his father’s 
tent, is fastened to the throne of Egypt. 

“Surely,” said the patriarch, “God is in this place.” As 
surely God was in that. plan. Perhaps, in most instances, he 
only interfered with the ordinary laws of nature to the extent 
of controlling them with a divine hand, as when he restrained 
Joseph for years from inquiring after his father, when a courier 
mounted on a dromedary would have brought him tidings of the 
old man in a very few days. That fact can only be explained by 
a special providence. And without a constant divine superin- 
tendence — a superintendence that wrought out its ends by many 


124 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


instrumentalities, even by dreams and crimes and the crudest, 
vilest passions that rage in human bosoms — how often had 
Joseph’s fortunes been completely wrecked ! No hand but God’s 
could have steered his bark through the storms, shoals, reefs and 
quicksands of his romantic and eventful life ; and well, therefore, 
might he acknowledge God in his remarkable success, saying to 
his brothers, “ As for you, ye thought evil against me, but God 
meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save 
much people alive.” 

2. Under God his success was due to himself. There is a 
passage in Palgrave’s “ Central Arabia,” on reading which I 
thought, “ So Pharaoh and Joseph may have been seen.” Pal- 
grave tells how the street was filled with a great throng of people. 
There is a commotion in the crowd. Opening, it shows an armed 
band advancing. They form a circle that has its centre occupied 
by those whose dress, with the respectful distance observed by 
their followers, announces their superior rank. It is the monarch. 
His step is measured, his demeanor grave and somewhat haughty. 
His robe is a Cashmere shawl. He wears a rich turban on his 
head, and at his girdle a gold-mounted sword. He moved, a 
cloud of perfumes ; and as he walked along his eye never rested, 
but flung eagle glances, rapid and brilliant, on the surrounding 
crowd. By his side walked one also wearing a sword, but 
mounted with silver, not with gold, and also richly dressed, 
though in somewhat less costly materials. This man’s face was 
more remarkable than his attire. It wore a courtly expression 
and beamed with unusual intelligence. Of these two, the first 
was Telal, the king ; the second, Zaniel, his treasurer, his prime 
minister, his sole minister. In this minister I saw Joseph at the 
right hand of Pharaoh. Their offices were alike. They resembled 
each other in this also, that both had risen to the highest from 
the humblest position in life. Joseph had been a slave, a prisoner, 
falsely accused and cruelly wronged. Zaniel had been an orphan, 
a ragged boy. His early years were passed in beggary ; nor was 


JOSEPH. 


125 


it by a mere wave of fortune that he was flung into his high 
position. He had climbed to it. He owed it to his admirable 
disposition, remarkable talents, unwearied industry, skill in busi- 
ness and extraordinary force of character. In this also the resem- 
blance between the two was remarkable ; for it was, under God, 
to his high moral and rare mental qualities, and not in any de- 
gree to chance or fortune, that the young Hebrew slave reached 
power and dignity, becoming governor of the kingdom which he 
had entered as a slave. 

Not simply to the wind, however auspicious, does the seaman 
owe his progress. Without it, indeed, his ship would but rise 
and fall in the swell of the deep, but without the skill to catch 
and use the breeze, and compel it, even w T hen adverse, by dex- 
trous trimming of the yards and setting of the sails and handling 
of the helm, to force him on and over the waves, what service 
were the wind to him ? So was it in Joseph’s, and so is it in all 
cases of success. God gives the opportunities, but success turns 
on the use we make of them ; on the promptitude with which we 
seize the openings of providence ; on the weight of character we 
bring into the field ; on the resolution and energy we throw into 
our business. 

This is an important practical truth. And to illustrate it let 
me now show how Joseph possessed and employed those powers 
and properties which, if Providence, so to speak, affords a man 
the ordinary chances of life, will win and command success. 

First of all — and to begin with that which gives the best 
foundation for prosperity in this world and the only assurance 
of salvation in the next — Joseph was a man of sterling piety and 
the most virtuous principles. Early instructed by a devout 
father, he never forgot the lessons of home and the God of his 
youth. So those who robbed him of his coat did not rob him 
of his character; nor, though reduced to slavery, could his mis- 
tress, by her frowns or favors, induce him to become the slave 
of sin. The young, when the only thing they should fear is 


126 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


guilt, are often afraid to stand up for truth and virtue. Imitator 
of them, he was not : neither concealing his regard for God nor 
his horror of sin. By his piety and virtue he won the confidence 
of his heathen masters. They saw that the Lord was with him, 
and acknowledged the blessing of having, though he was but a 
bondsman, a pious servant beneath their roof. 

Again, to the unsullied innocence of virtuous youth, Joseph 
united the wisdom and sagacity of age. An exception to the 
proverb that you cannot put an old head on young shoulders, 
with what cool skill and consummate foresight did he choose the 
steps necessary and most likely to attain his object ! Thus by 
dextrous statesmanship he saved Egypt from the horrors of 
famine; he added to the power of the crown while preserving 
the people ; he carried Pharaoh and the country safely through a 
tremendous crisis. And see how the sagacity which characterized 
his acts as a statesman appeared in the steps he took, and took 
with so much success, to awaken the consciences of his brethren, 
and bringing them to a sense of their sin, lay them true penitents 
at the feet of that God whose laws they had so grossly violated 
and of a brother they had so cruelly wronged ! 

Again, many people fail of success in their profession and pur- 
suits by neglecting the opportunities which Providence presents. 
They are not prompt to seize them and turn them to the most 
advantage. But see how Joseph pushed in wherever he saw an 
opening. He has Pharaoh’s butler for a fellow-prisoner. Some- 
thing may come out of that. In this man, menial as he was, and 
as to the credit of Joseph’s foresight it fell out, he may one day — 
to use a common expression in its literal as well as figurative 
sense — have “ a friend at court.” So, though it offered but what 
is called a chance, he does not allow the opportunity to escape. 
He bespeaks the good offices of the butler, teaching us, in our 
intercourse with mankind, never to make an enemy if we can 
avoid it, and when it is possible always to make a friend. 

Again, observe how, sure token of his rising one day to be the 


JOSEPH. 


127 


master of others, Joseph had acquired the mastery over himself. 
To the aid of piety he brought that strength of mind and resolu- 
tion of purpose for lack of which, perhaps, men equally pious 
have yielded to temptations he stoutly resisted ; have shamefully 
fallen where he stood; have lost the battle where he won a 
splendid victory. A grand thing — next to divine grace the 
grandest thing — to cultivate is decision of character. To that, 
in combination with the grace of God, Joseph owed it, I believe, 
that he came unscathed from the fiery furnace into which he was 
thrown in the house of Potiphar. On that resolute breast of his, 
temptations broke like sea waves on a rocky headland. Nor do 
his strength of purpose and the power he had acquired over him- 
self appear less remarkable in other passages of his life. It is 
difficult for us with unfaltering tongue to read the affecting scenes 
that passed between him and his brothers ere he dropped the 
mask. What his strength of mind who could go through them 
without a trace of emotion ! He is racked with anxiety about 
his aged father ; his bosom swells to the bursting at the sight of 
brothers to whom he yearns to disclose himself, that he may lock 
them in fond embraces. Yet he preserves a calm, and if not 
cold, an unimpassioned, bearing — like a mountain whose head is 
crowned with snows, and whose sides are mantled with green 
forests and vineyards and groves of olives, while the fires of a 
volcano are raging within its bosom. 

Lastly, there remains one feature of Joseph’s character de- 
serving of special notice. Along with an iron will, and an 
energy no task could daunt, no labor weary, no burden crush, he 
had a gentle, tender, loving heart. Unselfish, he was ready to 
sympathize with others. One day, for instance, when they seemed 
more than usually depressed, how kindly does he ask his fellow- 
prisoners, “ Wherefore look ye so sadly to-day ?” Then what a 
tender heart his, who, enduring wrong in Potiphar’s house with 
the silent heroism of a martyr, throws himself, in yonder palace, 
into the arms of his brethren and weeps over them like a woman ! 


128 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


I have no doubt whatever that to the generous, kindly, loving 
disposition which Joseph possessed, and all should cultivate, he 
owed not a little of his remarkable success. It won the regards 
and good will of others, kind affections often doing men such 
service as the arms which a creeping plant throws around a pole 
does it, when, springing from the ground, it rises by help of the 
very object it embraces. 

Such was Joseph. Just because he was such, God opening up 
his way and blessing him, he was a successful man. 

There was once a sailor, the only survivor of a shipwreck, who 
had a singular fate. Caught in the arms of a mountain billow 
as it went rolling to break in spray and snowy foam on an 
Orcadian headland, he was not dashed to pieces, but flung right 
into the mouth of a vast sea-cave, where the wave left him 
“safe and sound.” His fortune, if possible, was stranger still. 
On recovering from his shock and groping about, he found a 
barrel of provisions the same wave had swept in. With this and 
water trickling from the roof to quench his thirst, he sustained 
life, till, hearing a human cry mingling with the clang of sea- 
birds, a brave cragsman of these isles was swung over the preci- 
pice, and rescued him from his rocky prison. A wonderful provi- 
dence ! But it was no such wave of fortune that cast Joseph into 
the high post he filled. 

An example for men to imitate, he owed nothing to fortune, 
but, under God, everything to himself — to his piety, his pure 
and high morality, his extraordinary self-control, the patience 
with which he bore, the faith with which he waited, the perse- 
verance with which he pursued his objects, an iron will and an 
indomitable energy. These are properties which by prayer and 
pains the young should seek to acquire, and the oldest should 
assiduously cultivate. To these, more than to genius or to great 
talents, or to any of those things which are called good fortune, 
xhe greatest of men have ascribed their success. I could produce 
a hundred testimonies to that effect, but none better than the one 


JOSEPH. 


129 


with which I now close this paper. In a letter to his son, Sir 
Fowell Buxton, a great and eminently Christian man, says, 
“ You are now at that period of life in which you must make a 
turn to the right or the left. You must now give proof of prin- 
ciple, determination and strength of mind, or you must sink into 
idleness, and acquire the habits and character of an ineffective 
young man. I am sure that a young man may be very much 
what he pleases. In my own case it was so. Much of my happi- 
ness and all my prosperity in life have resulted from the change 
I made at your age.” Elsewhere he says, “ The longer I live, 
the more I am certain that the great difference between men, be- 
tween the feeble and the powerful, the great and the insignificant, 
is energy, invincible determination — a purpose once fixed, and 
then death or victory 1” 


y 




VIII. 

JOB. 

have heard of the patience of Job,” says an apostle, 
and have seen the end of the Lord, that the Lord is 
ery compassionate, and of tender mercy.” The cha- 
pter of Job, which is usually brought forward as an 
example of patient submission to the afflictions of life and ot 
steadfast trust in God amidst the severest trials, is hardly less 
conspicuous for humble dependence upon him, strict adherence to 
his worship and service, and compassionate care of the needy and 
unfortunate amidst those temptations with which men of high 
stations and overflowing opulence are beset. The wealth of Job 
is estimated, according to the manner of those simple times, by 
the number of his flocks and h°rds and the multitude of his 
family and dependants, and he is declared in these respects to 
have surpassed in riches all the men of the East. But the power 
and influence he possessed over his countrymen, and the honor in 
which he was held, did not proceed merely from his wealth, but 
also from the high character he bore for wisdom, integrity and 
beneficence. When he “ went out to the gate,” and prepared his 
seat in the street — i. e. y when he sat as judge or arbiter, to hear 
such causes as were brought to his decision — “ the young saw, and 
hid themselves, and the aged arose and stood up; the chief men 
refrained talking, and the nobles held their peace : he chose out 
their way, and sat as chief” among them. 

Job was also, as was the custom of patriarchal times, the faith- 
130 



JOB. 


131 


ful priest of his household— watching over the conduct of his 
children, and offering daily prayers and sacrifices according to 
their number, lest peradventure they might in their festivities 
have fallen away from God and incurred his displeasure. His 
superfluous wealth he employed in ministering to the necessities 
of others, and his power was exerted in redressing the grievances 
of the oppressed. He “ delivered the poor that cried, and the 
fatherless, and him that had none to help him. The blessing of 
him that was ready to perish came upon him ; he was eyes to the 
blind, feet to the lame, and a father to the poor. The cause that 
he knew not he searched out ; he brake the jaws of the wicked, 
and plucked the spoil out of his teeth.” Such was Job, “ in the 
days when,” as he describes them, “ God preserved him, and his 
candle shined upon his head. By the light of God he walked 
through darkness; the secret of the Lord was upon his taber- 
nacle; the Almighty was with him.” 

But it pleased God, who chooses out for all the lot of their 
inheritance, to visit Job with sad reverses. By a sudden in- 
cursion of a band of predatory Arabs, on the boundary of whose 
country Job lived, and by one of those furious tempests of the 
elements which are not uncommon in that quarter of the world, 
he was at once deprived of his whole substance and of his nume- 
rous family of children. Thus was he plunged from the height 
of worldly prosperity into utter destitution, and he who was 
lately surrounded by sons and daughters found himself alone in 
the world. Yet his conduct under these overwhelming losses 
evinced the utmost magnanimity and pious resignation. He felt 
deeply the calamities which had thus befallen him, but he had 
recourse to the true and only refuge. “ He fell down upon the 
ground, and worshiped, and said, Naked came I forth, and naked 
shall 1 return to the earth : the Lord gave, and the Lord hath 
taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. In all this, Job 
sinned not, nor charged God foolishly.” 

But the Almighty, who has constituted this life a state of trial 


132 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


and discipline — who, in preparing sinful man for future glory, 
has made suffering the necessary preparative for enjoyment, and 
abasement the means of still higher exaltation — was pleased to 
add to the load of distress which had thus fallen upon his faithful 
servant, by subjecting him to severe and loathsome bodily dis- 
ease. Even this visitation did not at its first infliction extort 
a single complaint from the lips of Job. “ Shall we receive 
good,” said he, “ at the hand of God, and shall we not receive 
evil? In all this did not Job sin with his lips.” 

It appears astonishing that the mind of any of the frail sons 
of men should have been able to sustain the sudden shock of such 
a weight of woe; and yet it may be questioned whether the diffi- 
culty be not still greater, of sustaining with firmness and patient 
resignation the wearisome days and nights which succeed the first 
attack of lingering but hopeless disease, aggravated, as in this 
case it was, by so many mournful recollections. It was this con- 
tinuance of bodily and mental suffering, more than the violence 
of its first shock, which appears, from the account which Job 
himself gives of his situation, to have borne the most heavily 
upon him, and to have gone the farthest toward unhinging his 
mind. To all the other causes of distress there is one to be 
added, which never fails to accompany the fall of the prosperous, 
and that is the desertion of false friends and the cold neglect 
shown by those who formerly were foremost with their services 
and flatteries. This is an evil which, abstractly considered, ap- 
pears trivial when compared with many others, and yet it is 
almost always found to strike deep into the heart that is already 
pressed with other misfortunes, and to excite painful complaints 
where greater calamities are borne with patience. We find that 
Job was not insensible to the pain arising from the changed 
deportment of friends and dependants. u I am made,” says he, 
“ to possess months of vanity, and wearisome nights are appointed 
me. When I lie down, I say, When shall I arise, and the night 
he gone ? and I am full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning 


JOB. 


133 


of the day.” “ My bones are pierced in me in the night season, 
and my sinews take no rest.” “My kinsfolk” also “have 
failed, and my familiar friends have forgotten me. They that 
dwell in my house count me as a stranger. I called my servant, 
and he gave me no answer.” “ Yea, young children have despised 
me,” “ and they whom I loved are turned against me.” 

Certain friends, however, Job had, who, we are informed, 
“made an appointment together to come to mourn with him, 
and to comfort him.” The religious views entertained by these 
friends, sincere as they no doubt were in the sentiments they 
professed, were not, however, such as rendered their visit a source 
of consolation to the sufferer. Pressed with the difficulties which 
beset that great question, the origin of evil — a question which in 
all ages of the world has proved the fruitful source of gloomy 
doubts and rash speculations — and not sufficiently adverting to 
the preparatory nature of the present state of existence, and the 
necessity and value of afflictions in the present life, as the means 
of preparing creatures of corrupted nature for the pure and exalted 
enjoyments of a heavenly and eternal state, these friends of the 
patriarch, sincere in their belief of a wise and righteous Provi- 
dence superintending the conduct and ordering the lot of all, and 
zealous to justify God’s dealings, considered it necessary for that 
purpose to maintain that the blessings and the evils of the present 
state, whatever appearances to the contrary may exist, are, in 
truth, distributed by divine Providence exactly according to 
men’s deserts. The doctrine which they held, so far as it seems 
consistent with itself, amounts to this, that the present life is, 
notwithstanding appearances to the contrary, a state of retribu- 
tion, that the justice of God requires that prosperity and happi- 
ness should be the lot only of the good, and that none but wicked 
persons can be the subjects of severe or extraordinary sufferings. 
The changes which take place in the lot of the same individual, 
with many other circumstances observable in human condition, 
obliged them, indeed, to acknowledge that this principle which 


134 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


they held mast be received under certain limitations, which it 
did not belong to man to inquire too curiously into, and they 
were ready to silence all doubts and objections, grounded on such 
circumstances, by summary appeals to the absolute sovereignty 
of God . 1 But considering their doctrine as infallibly true to this 
extent, that a remarkable change from prosperity to adversity 
cannot, without impeaching the justice of God, be supposed to 
take place for any such purpose as that of trial and discipline, 
but only as a judgment or punitive visitation, they of conse- 
quence maintained that Job’s conduct must, in order to draw 
down such an accumulation of misery, have been singularly 
wicked and displeasing to God. 

We need not much wonder at the nature of the doctrine thus 
held by the friends of Job, for there seems a proneness in human 
nature to form the same unjustifiable conclusion respecting such 
dispensations of Providence, happening in the case of others, as 
chance to be of a nature suddenly and singularly afflictive. We 
have an example of this, taken notice of by our Saviour himself, 
who takes the opportunity of authoritatively contradicting the 
conclusion as founded in error. “Suppose ye,” says he to his 
disciples, “that those Galileans” (whose blood Pilate mingled 
with their sacrifices) “were sinners above all the Galileans, be- 
cause they suffered such things? I tell you nay.” “Or those 
eighteen upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them ; 
think ye that they were sinners above all the men that dwelt in 
Jerusalem? I tell you nay.” Job’s friends, however, entertained 
that common view of such matters which our Saviour here de- 
nounces as false, and accordingly, in perfect consistency with it, 
they desired to bring Job to an acknowledgment of that extra- 
ordinarily iniquitous conduct which they inferred he must have 
been guilty of, in order to draw down such an extraordinary 
weight of calamity upon his head. And as they were well aware 

1 “ The three aged friends are the ‘ liars for God/ the dogged defenders of the 
traditional popular belief.” — Stanley. 


job: 


135 


that his external conduct had been not onty fair and reputable, 
out even highly praiseworthy, they concluded that all this must 
have been mere hypocrisy on his part, intended to cloak a secret 
course of iniquity. Holding these opinions, we cannot much 
wonder that they should have endeavored to bring Job to a con- 
fession of the guilt they confidently imputed to him, as the first 
and necessary step toward his making his peace with God and 
obtaining a mitigation of the heavy judgments sent upon him. 
“ Is not thy wickedness,” said they, " great, and thine iniquities 
excessive ? Hast thou not taken a pledge from thy brother for 
naught, and stripped the destitute of their clothing? Thou hast 
not given water to the weary to drink, and hast withholden bread 
from the hungry.” “ Thou hast sent widows away empty, and 
the arms of the fatherless have been broken. Therefore snares 
are round about thee, and sudden fear troubleth thee.” “ Thou 
hast said, How doth God know? — can he judge through the dark 
cloud ? Thick clouds are a covering to him, that he seeth not.” 
“ Hast thou marked the old way which wicked men have trodden, 
who were cut down out of time, whose foundations were over- 
thrown with a flood ?” 

It may be readily perceived that this course of proceeding on 
the part of Job’s friends, however well intended, entitled them to 
any character rather than that of comforters ; nor can we conceive 
anything more trying to the patience of one overwhelmed by 
calamities, who was at the same time conscious, amidst many 
failings, of the sincerity of his heart toward God, and of the up- 
rightness and beneficence of his general conduct. If Job, then, 
bending to the earth under all the miseries of his condition, and 
now, in addition to all his other sufferings, charged with hypocrisy 
and unknown crimes, and that by friends whom he knew to be 
sincerely pious men, did at times betray fretfulness, and speak 
unadvisedly with his lips in justification of himself, what shall 
we venture to say of such occasional expressions, except that this 
Venerable patriarch, “ perfect and upright” as he is declared to 


136 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


have been — “one that feared God, and eschewed evil” — was still 
but a man ? Only One ever bore the human form and underwent 
sufferings equal to those of Job — sufferings, indeed, with which 
those of Job cannot be compared — without betraying weakness ; 
and he was not mere man : “ there is none” absolutely “ good but 
one, that is, God.” 

Throughout the general tenor of Job’s answers to the accusa- 
tions of his friends, and the long disputation which he held with 
them, we find the soundest views of God’s providence displayed, 
and the most submissive feelings. He maintains uniformly the 
true scriptural doctrine respecting the varieties of human con- 
dition and the alternations of prosperity and adversity; that 
these are not to be held as the certain marks or measure of God’s 
favor or displeasure, neither are they to be considered as promis- 
cuously or accidentally distributed, but that all the goods and ills 
of life are appointed by a wise and kind Providence for important 
and beneficent ends, though, from the imperfection of our facul- 
ties and the narrow sphere of our knowledge, the proceedings of 
Heaven must often appear dark and intricate. He is far from 
grounding his justification of himself against the charges of his 
friends upon any such presumptuous imagination as that of abso- 
lute rectitude, nor does he charge God foolishly, as if he had met 
with injustice at his hand. “I have sinned,” he exclaims; 
“what shall I do unto thee, O thou preserver of men? Though 
I were righteous, yet would I not answer ; but I would make 
supplication to my Judge.” But “thou knowest that I am not 
wicked” — i.e., not wicked in the sense according to which he 
was charged by his friends, not guilty of hypocrisy and the other 
crimes imputed to him: “my step hath not turned out of the 
way, nor mine heart walked after mine eyes, nor hath any blot 
cleaved to mine hands.” There is also the most uniform and 
fervent expression, throughout, of resignation and reliance on 
God. “ Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.” “ All the 
days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come.” 


JOB. 


137 


And that this hope was full of immortality — a hope bottomed on 
the only sure foundation — the following remarkable words abun- 
dantly testify : “ I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he 
shall stand at the latter day upon the earth : and though after 
my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see 
God ; whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, 
and not another.” 

At the same time it must be confessed that expressions did, on 
some trying occasions in the course of the disputation, drop from 
his lips, betraying despondency and fretfulness, and not altogether 
devoid of presumption. “ Oh that I might have my request, and 
that God would grant me the thing that I long for ! even then it 
would please God to cut me off*.” “ Let the day perish wherein I 
was born ; let that day be darkness.” “ Surely I would speak 
to the Almighty, and I desire to reason with God : I would order 
my cause before him. Behold, my desire is, that the Almighty 
would answer me.” These, and suchlike despairing and irreverent 
expressions, wrung from Job by the severity of his misfortunes, 
aggravated by the unjust charges of his friends, did not escape 
the ear of the Almighty, who granted, to his confusion, the rash 
desire he had expressed, that he would answer him. The God 
of heaven manifested himself to the disputants, and settled their 
controversy, by sanctioning with his approval the views which 
Job had taken of the measures of his administration, sharply re- 
proving him, at the same time, for the weakness and rashness 
which he had occasionally displayed. Nothing can be more 
sublime and impressive than the views displayed by the Almighty 
of his own universal and absolute sovereignty, his unsearchable 
wisdom, and the grandeur of the whole scheme of creation and 
providence. Abashed and confounded at his own presumptuous 
folly, in having dared so boldly to enter upon matters too high 
for man, and even to desire an opportunity of reasoning with his 
Maker, Job exclaims, “ Lo, I am vile : what shall I answer thee? 
I will lay mine hand upon my mouth. Once have I spoken, but 


138 


GREAT MEN 01' GCD. 


I will not reply ; yea, twice, but I will proceed no further.” And 
when the Almighty was pleased still further to place before him 
a representation of the vast variety of his works, with the many 
difficulties, unfathomable to human understanding, with which 
even the visible creation abounds, Job seems to sink under the 
sense of his own utter impotence and vileness. “ I have heard 
of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee; 
wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” 

But although it pleased the Almighty thus to reprove and 
effectually to humble his servant, that his soul might be further 
purified from the remains of corruption, and rendered capable of 
still higher exaltation and enjoyment in his own presence for ever, 
he administered a still sharper rebuke to his friends, and directed 
them to accept Job’s intercession for them, that they might escape 
further punishment. “ Offer up for yourselves a burnt-offering, 
and my servant Job shall pray for you, for him will I accept; 
lest I deal with you after your folly, in that ye have not spoken 
of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath.” This was 
the commencement of brighter prospects to the suffering patriarch. 
The thick clouds of adversity began to dissolve; and it pleased 
God to testify, by his restoration to temporal prosperity, his ap- 
probation of the religious sentiments he had expressed, and of the 
trust in his providence and patient submission with which he had 
undergone the severe trials to which he had been subjected. “ So 
the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than the beginning ;” 
“and he lived after this an hundred and forty years, and saw his 
sons, and his sons’ sons, even four generations.” And thus shall 
he abundantly recompense, if not in this life, certainly in the next, 
all who endure patiently, committing the keeping of their souls 
unto him in well-doing. It is the privilege of such to look for- 
ward confidently to their union with them who are come out of 
great tribulation, who have washed their robes and made them 
white in the blood of the Lamb, and who, with praise and joy, 
surround his throne for ever and ever. 



IX. 

MOSES. 

him for all in all, regard him not in one but 
7 aspects, Moses is the greatest character in his- 
sacred or profane. 

as a writer , for example, he takes precedence of the 
most venerable authors of antiquity. Consecrating, so to speak, 
the press, the first book types ever printed was a copy of the 
Holy Scriptures ; and in beautiful harmony with that remark- 
able providence, it is more than probable that the first book pen 
ever wrote was one of the five of which Moses was the author. 
Certain it is that if his were not the first ever written — written 
long ages before Herodotus composed his history or Homer sang 
his poems — his are the oldest books extant. Before all others in 
point of time, what author occupies himself with themes of such 
surpassing grandeur ? Like one who had met God face to face 
within the cloudy curtains of the awful mount, he introduces us 
into the counsels of the Almighty, and records events which, 
receding into a past and stretching forward into a future eternity, 
had God for their author, the world for their theatre, and for V 
their end the everlasting destinies of mankind. Apart from the 
surpassing grandeur of his subjects, even in the very manner of 
handling them, the world’s oldest is its foremost writer. What 
other poet rises to heights or sustains a flight so lofty as Moses — 
in his dying song, for instance, his parting words to the tribes of 
Israel ere he ascended Nebo to wave them his last farewell and 

139 



140 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


vanish for ever from their wondering, weeping gaze? The inimi- 
table pathos of his style as illustrated in the story of Joseph, the 
tears and trembling voices of readers in all ages have acknow- 
ledged. In simple, tender, touching narrative, no passages in 
any other book will compare with it; and yet so wide and varied 
is his range that the writings of Moses contain — infidels them- 
selves being judges — the sublimest expressions man has spoken 
or penned. By universal consent, for example, no other book, 
ancient or modern, the production of the highest mind and of the 
most refined and cultivated age, contains a sentence so sublime as 
this: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” 

Again, as a divine , compared to his knowledge of the attributes 
and character of God, how gross the notions of the heathen ! how 
puerile, dim and distorted the speculations of their greatest sages ! 
The wisest of them look like men with unsteady steps and out- 
stretched arms groping for truth in the dark. As to the mass 
of people, they imputed crimes and vices to their gods which 
would now-a-days consign men to the gallows or banish them 
from decent society. But how pure, and comprehensive also, 
Moses’ estimate of the divine character — of what we are to be- 
lieve concerning God, and what duty God requires of men ! 
Since his day — removed from our own by almost four thousand 
years — science has made prodigious strides ; but those who have 
discovered new elements, new forces, new worlds, new stars, new 
suns, have brought to light no new attribute of God, nor a single 
feature of his character with which Moses was not acquainted. 
During these long ages philosophers and divines have been study- 
ing morals, the duties men owe to God and to each other, the laws 
that bind society and hold its parts together ; but they who have 
added a thousand truths to science and a thousand inventions to 
art have not discovered any duties which Moses overlooked, or 
added so much as one law to his code of morals. Yet he had no 
Bible, as we have, whereby to acquaint himself with God ; nor 
was he reared, like us, in a Christian land, but among those who, 


MOSES. 


141 


with all their boasted learning, worshiped the ox and serpent, 
beasts of the field, fowls of the air and creeping things — divini- 
ties so innumerable that it was said there were more gods than 
men in Egypt. Let the character of his age and the circum- 
stances in which he lived be taken into account, and he is the 
greatest of divines; nor does his sublime knowledge of God, of 
the mysteries of religion and of the moralities of life admit of 
any but one explanation. The glory of his writings and of his 
face are to be traced to the same source. He was admitted into 
the secret counsels of the Eternal, and spake, like other holy men 
of old, as he was moved by the Holy Ghost. 

Again, as a leader and legislator Moses occupies a place no other 
man has approached, far less attained to. History records no 
such achievements as his who, without help from man, struck the 
fetters off a million and more of slaves; placing himself at their 
head, led them forth from the land of bondage; reducing them 
to order, controlled more turbulent and subdued more stubborn 
elements than any before or since have had to deal with ; formed 
a great nation out of such base materials ; and casting into the 
shade the celebrated retreat of the ten thousand Greeks, con- 
ducted to a successful issue the longest and hardest march on 
record — a march continued for forty years in the face of formid- 
able enemies, through howling wildernesses and desert sands. 
Then look at the sacred and secular polity which he established 
in Israel ! That constitution which makes England so prominent 
among nations has been, like an oak, the slow growth of ages, and 
it was often only after long and sometimes bloody struggles that 
right there prevailed over might, and laws were established that 
render equal justice to all classes of the community. But, event 
unparalleled in any other age or country, Moses established in 
Israel a form of government and a code of laws which neither 
time nor experience has been able to improve. Like the goddess 
fabled to have sprung, full grown and full armed, from the head 
of Jupiter, or like those who never hung on mother’s breast, the 


142 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


man and woman whom Eden received to its blissful bowers, it 
was mature and perfect from the beginning. What a man was he 
who, in that rude and early age, inculcated laws that have formed, 
through all succeeding ages, the highest standard of morality ! 
Since his long-distant day men have run to and fro and know- 
ledge has been increased ; the boundaries of science have been 
vastly extended, but not those of morality; nor has one new duty 
been added to those of the two tables he brought down from 
Sinai. A perfect code of morals, adapted to all ages, circum- 
stances and countries, time has neither altered nor added to the 
Ten Commandments. 

The ten stones of the arch on which our domestic happiness, 
the purity of society, the security of life and property and the 
prosperity of nations stand, it was these commandments the Son 
of God came from heaven, our substitute, to obey ; with his blood, 
not to abrogate, but to enforce them ; on his cross to exalt, not in 
his tomb to bury, them; and cementing the shattered arch with 
his precious blood, to lend to laws that had the highest authority 
of Sinai the no less solemn and more affecting sanctions of 
Calvary. 

As a legislator, besides moral, Moses established criminal and 
civil, laws, which, unless in so far as they were specially adapted 
to the circumstances of the Israelites, our senators and magis- 
trates would do well to copy. Inspired with the profoundest 
wisdom, they are patterns to all ages of equity and justice. For 
instance, how much kinder to the poor, and less burdensome to 
the community, than ours, are what may be called the “poor 
laws” of Moses! How much more wise than ours those that 
dealt with theft — thus far that, requiring the thief to restore four- 
fold the value of what he had stolen, and work till he had done 
so, they assigned to that crime a punishment which at once 
secured reparation to the plundered and the reformation of the 
plunderer! Nor less wise, I may add, those sanitary laws of 
which, though long neglected, late years and bitter experience 


MOSES. 


143 


have been teaching us the importance. It is only now, with all 
our boasted progress in arts and science, that we are awaking to 
the value of such regulations as, securing cleanliness in the habits 
and in the homes of the people, promote their health and pre- 
serve their lives. Anticipating the discoveries of the nineteenth 
century and the plans of our modern sanitary reformers, Moses 
was four thousand years ahead of his age. Judged, therefore, 
either by the civil or criminal code he enjoined, or by those Ten 
Commandments which lie at the foundations of all human justice, 
and shall continue the supreme standard of morals so long as 
time endures, Moses claims precedence over all the sovereigns 
and senators and legislators the world has seen. 

As a philosopher , notwithstanding the audacious attacks now 
making on his narrative of the Creation, I venture to say that 
Moses, as he was first in the point of time, is the first in point of 
rank. He fills in the temple of science that high priestly office 
his brother held in the temple of religion. How sublime, for 
example, his account of Creation compared with the monstrous 
fables and puerile conceits current among pagan nations! I 
know, indeed, no greater contrast than that between the childish, 
monstrous and often immodest mythologies of India, Egypt, 
Greece and Rome, and those opening pages of the Book of 
Genesis where God appears on the scene — calling creation into 
being by his simple but almighty word ; establishing order amid 
unimaginable confusion ; evoking light out of primeval darkness ; 
assigning their different offices to the elements of earth and the 
shining orbs of heaven ; building up the grand pyramid of Na- 
ture, and on its lofty apex placing man, made in his own image 
and enthroned lord of all. Believe some, and this is all a fancy, 
a mere fable. Foiled at every point and on every occasion where 
they employed history and mental or moral science to attack the 
Christian faith ; compelled also to acknowledge that the most 
formidable skeptics of other days, Hobbes and Voltaire, David 
Hume and Tom Paine — without followers now save among the 


144 


GREAT MEN OF GOD 


dregs of society — were ignominiously defeated, the infidels of our 
day have changed their plan of attack. Obliged to seek new 
weapons, they are now attempting to overthrow the authority of 
Moses by the authority of physical science ; and ever as some old 
bone, some fragment of ancient pottery, some stone axe or arrow- 
head, turns up which they fancy will serve their purpose, there is 
great shouting in the camp of the Philistines, and fear seizes some 
that “ the ark of God is taken.” A bone in Samson’s hand, the 
jawbone even of an ass, once did great execution, as did also the 
piece of pottery which a woman from the beleaguered wall pitched 
on the head of Abimelech, smiting him to the ground. But the 
enemies of our faith, though using similar weapons, have not 
achieved equal success. Looking at the future in the light of the 
past, we can only wonder at the timidity of those who fear these 
assaults, and at the credulity of such as, however fond of novel- 
ties, allow such crude and silly arguments to seduce them from 
the faith. 

For example, a few years since a human jawbone was paraded 
before the world. It was said to have been dug out of a gravel- 
bed in France of so great antiquity that the person to whom it 
belonged must have existed many thousand years antecedent to 
the period at which Moses places the first appearance of man on 
the earth. Well, this bone, whose vast age was to demolish the 
authority of the Bible, being sawn asunder, was examined ; and 
with what result? Its internal condition demonstrated that, in- 
stead of being older than the age of Adam, it was but a few — even 
if a few — years older than those who were more the dupes of their 
own hatred to religion than of the workmen that had stolen this 
fragment of mortality from a churchyard and palmed it off on 
these credulous skeptics. 

There is another and similar fact, much too instructive to be 
left in the oblivion to which mortified and defeated infidels would 
fain consign it. Years ago a brick was found on the banks of 
the Nile, but many feet beneath their surface. These banks are 


MOSES. 


145 


formed of the slimy and fertile mud which each annual overflow 
deposits in the green valley of that famous river; and assuming 
— for all the theories opposed to Christianity are full of assump- 
tions as the basis of their calculations — that these deposits have 
been of the same thickness, one year with another, from the most 
remote antiquity, such w T as the depth at which this brick was 
found, that it must have been made many thousand years before 
the time at which Moses fixes the creation of man. So infidels 
alleged and argued. How they told this in Gath and published 
it in the streets of Ashkelon ! With this brick they had inflicted 
a blow on the head of Moses from which he could not possibly 
recover — with him not “ Babylon the Great/' but the faith of 
Christendom, had fallen. Well, the defenders of the faith were 
puzzled and not a little perplexed. It was not easy to prove 
that the deposits of the Nile w 7 ere irregular, and that the founda- 
tions, therefore, on which the attack rested were unsound. But, 
leaching us not to allow our confidence in the faith to be easily 
shaken by things which are at first, and even may continue, in- 
explicable, the problem was at length solved. The difficulty was 
finally and authoritatively removed. This famous brick fell into 
the hands of one familiar wdth the works of antiquity, and above 
all others expert in determining their age. He examined it, and 
proved to demonstration that, however it got buried in the valley 
of the Nile, or whatever be the rate of increase in the river's 
alluvial deposits, that brick did not carry us back to ages ante- 
cedent to Mosaic history. It was of Homan manufacture, and 
belonged to an age no older than the Caesars. 

Christianity does not teach science, nor profess to teach it. It 
was for another and higher purpose that its pages were inspired. 
To serve its own proper and important end, it adapted its lan- 
guage to the times and the understandings of those it addressed. 
And though, in consequence of this, there were statements in the 
Bible which could not be reconciled with the modern discoveries 
of science, these should not have the weight of a feather against 
10 


146 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


the historical, the external and internal, the miraculous and 
prophetical evidences on which its divinity stands, and has stood 
unshaken the assaults of two thousand years. 

But, in truth, the greater the progress of science, the more 
manifest is the harmony between its revelations and those of the 
word of God. 

For instance, Moses represents the earth as having been, ante- 
cedent to the present epoch, without form, and void — an expression 
denoting a state of extreme and violent confusion, of death and 
drear desolation. And how is his statement not confuted, but 
corroborated, by the remarkable discoveries of the nineteenth cen- 
tury ? The very same story is written on the rocks which we 
read in the book of Genesis. The solid strata above which we 
walk, build our houses and reap our harvests have been explored 
by the light of science, and in their strange contortions, irregu- 
larities and confusion, and those remains of innumerable and ex- 
tinct creatures that, retaining the postures of a violent and sudden 
death, have been entombed within their stony sepulchres, they 
present a most remarkable commentary on Holy Writ. 

Again, in the last days, according to St. Peter, there w r ere 
scoffers to arise, asserting “ that all things remain as they were 
from the beginning of the creation.” So said David Hume ; and 
so still say those who, in opposition to Moses and to the miracles 
of Scripture, take their stand on the uniform successions and in- 
variable operations of the laws of Nature. But here the philoso- 
pher’s geology and our theology are at one. The most novel 
discoveries of our age are in harmony with the oldest statements 
of revelation. They prove that there have been no such in- 
variable operations as would exclude the possibility or proba- 
bility of miracles. They demonstrate what Moses asserts, that 
all things have not remained as they were from the beginning. 
They show causes even now at work sufficient in the course of 
time to bring about the grand catastrophe that, with a God in 
judgment and a world in flames, shall usher in a new era — “ the 


MOSES. 


147 


new heavens, and the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteous- 
ness.” 

Again, the Bible teaches us that the world is <( reserved unto 
fire,” and what it long ages ago revealed is the conclusion to 
which the discoveries of science are now tending. In proof of 
that, see what one of our greatest modern philosophers, who has 
certainly never stood forth as a defender of the faith, says. He 
maintains that through the agency of volcanoes and other active 
causes, “ the foundations of our earth shall be so weakened that 
its crust, shaken and rent by reiterated convulsions, must in the 
course of time fall in.” “ When we consider,” says Sir Charles 
Lyell, “ the combustible nature of the elements of the earth ; the 
facility with which their compounds may be decomposed and 
enter into new combinations; the quantity of heat which they 
evolve during these processes; when we recollect the expansive 
power of steam, and that water itself is composed of two gases 
which, by their union, produce intense heat; when we call to 
mind the number of explosive and detonating compounds which 
have been already discovered, — we may be allowed to share the 
astonishment of Pliny that a single day should pass without a 
general conflagration : Excedit profedo, omnia miracula , ullum 
diemfuisse , quo non cunda conflagrarent .” 

Again, and to take one other example from Moses’ account of 
the Creation, he represents light as having been formed before 
the sun was hung in heaven to rule the day, or the moon to rule 
the night. According to him, ere day or night was, God sent 
forth the fiat , u Let there be light, and there was light.” And 
taking their stand on an apparent impossibility, infidels have 
challenged the soundness of his philosophy, asking, in tones of 
undisguised triumph, How could there be light before and with- 
out the sun ? Well, this was a difficulty. Satisfied on other and 
impregnable grounds of the truth of the sacred narrative, Chris- 
tians felt confident that the objection admitted of an answer ; but 
till science came to the rescue, such answers as they attempted 


148 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


were more ingenious than satisfactory. The difficulty, however, 
lias vanished, and Moses’ account, no longer a subject for cavil- 
ing, is found to be in perfect harmony with the discoveries and 
the doctrines of modern science. Inspired of God, he anticipated 
our tardy discoveries. Relating that light was created before the 
sun appeared, he represents it as an element existing independently 
of that luminary. And so it does. This is now all but universally 
admitted, light being regarded as the effect of the undulations of 
an ether which, infinitely subtile and elastic, pervades all space, 
and finds but exciting causes in electricity and combustion, the 
sun and stars. 

In taking leave of Moses as a philosopher, I have one more 
remark to make — one inexplicable unless he were inspired. It 
was thousands of years before the telescope was invented and 
Galileo had turned it on the starry heavens ; before Newton had 
discovered the laws of gravitation ; before anatomists had studied 
the structure of a fossil bone ; before geologists had explored the 
bowels and strata of our earth ; it was long ages, in fact, before 
true science was born, that Moses lifted the veil from the mys- 
teries of Creation, stating facts in regard to its order and laws and 
phenomena that are in perfect harmony with the greatest dis- 
coveries of our day. Surely, as he was the first, he is the greatest, 
of philosophers ; as well the greatest philosopher as the greatest 
writer, divine, leader and lawgiver the world has seen. 

Let us now regard him as a patriot. There are those who do 
not believe in patriotism, treating it as some of our popular 
novelists, whose works are appropriately called “ works of 
fiction,” do religion. Unable to understand religion, they can 
only caricature it. Whenever any of their characters, man or 
woman, is introduced as using the language of piety, or as be- 
longing to what, borrowing an expression from the ribald words 
of Robert Burns, they call the unco gude , that person they in- 
variably represent as either a fool or a hypocrite, weak or wicked. 
If their defence is that they, painting from life, have described 


MOSES. 


149 


religious people as they found them, we might reply they had 
been very unfortunate in their company, and that, as was likely 
to happen with men of their type, they must have been much 
more familiar with the dross than the gold of religious society. 
But their bad opinion of such as make a marked profession of 
piety may be otherwise accounted for. “ Thou thoughtest,” says 
God to the wicked, “ that I was altogether such an one as thy- 
self;” and feeling, with minds at enmity with God and averse 
to the practice of holiness and virtue, that they themselves should 
be hypocrites were they to assume a strict profession, they judge 
others by themselves. Nor are they singular in the use of so 
false a standard. Profligates and libertines do not believe in the 
existence of virtue, regarding it in others as a mere pretence, 
nothing else than the paint which hides the blotches on the face 
of vice. Neither do thieves, I may observe, believe in honesty. 
Nor do selfish men believe in generosity. Many politicians, the 
heads or tools of parties, though not steeped in such corruption 
as that minister of the last century who boasted that he knew the 
price of every member of the House of Commons, have only 
sought their own aggrandizement when they talked loudest of 
their country, its liberties, its honor and its interests. And no 
wonder that men without a spark of patriotism in their own 
breasts should doubt its existence in others ! 

Presenting a noble contrast to the proverb long common in 
Italy, Dolce far niente — “It is sweet to indulge in idleness” — the 
old Roman sang, Dulce et decorum est pro patrid mori — “ It is 
sweet and graceful to die for one’s country ;” and one of these old 
Romans is said, when it was only by such a sacrifice that Rome 
could be spared, to have rode out of its gates full armed in sight 
of weeping thousands, and taking brave farewell of brothers, 
friends and countrymen, to have spurred his steed into the gulf 
that closed its monstrous jaws on horse and rider. The lofty 
patriotism of the poet may be only the sentimentalism of song, 
and the hero of the gulf only such a fable as adorns traditionary 


150 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


lore. But Moses was a patriot of that type. He shrunk from 
no sacrifice required by the good of his people. 

How the Americans were extolled when, in a battle between 
the Chinese and the English, they remained not mere specta- 
tors, but mingled boldly in the fight, which, indeed, was not 
merely England’s quarrel, but that of civilization against semi- 
barbarism. Hoisting anchor and spreading sail, they took their 
places in the fray, saying, “Blood is thicker than water!” 
It was in such another act that Moses’ patriotism first burst out 
into flame. Neither his rank as the adopted son of Pharaoh’s 
daughter and probable successor to her father’s throne, nor his 
education as a prince of Egypt, nor the pride and pomp and 
pleasures of a palace, had made him ashamed of his race, or indif- 
ferent to their cruel sufferings. His brave mother, in her assumed 
character of a nurse, had probably told her boy the story of his 
people and of their wrongs, swearing him to fidelity, and sowing 
in his young heart the seeds of that piety and patriotism which 
afterward determined his choice. Though apparently dormant 
for forty years, as has happened in cases of conversion, the seed 
a mother’s hand sowed at length sprang up. He began to feel 
and take a deep interest in bis people. Their sufferings haunted 
his pillow by night and engaged his anxious thoughts by day. 
The fire, so to speak, was laid, and it needed but a spark, the 
touch of a match, to kindle it — a purpose served by a sight he 
one day happened to see. Concealing his object, he had gone 
“ out to his brethren to look on their burdens,” when it chanced 
that an Egyptian was smiting a Hebrew. He looked. He felt 
every blow that fell on the poor crouching slave. The fated 
hour had come. Plucking off the mask which had for a while 
concealed his secret, he flung himself into the fray, and bestriding 
his prostrate compatriot, with flashing eye faced the Egyptian and 
smote him dead. Life he risks; safety, riches, honors, rank and 
perhaps a crown he casts away — all to right the wrongs of a 
bleeding slave, in whom his piety recognized a child of God, 


MOSES. : 


151 


and his patriotism a countryman and a brother. In the words 
of St. Paul, u By faith Moses, when he was come to years, refused 
to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter; choosing rather to 
suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures 
of sin for a season ; esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches 
than the treasures in Egypt.” 

This, if it could not be called his early, was now his only, 
choice. Unlike many who, yielding to the generous impulses of 
youth, espouse the cause of the wronged and fight their first 
battles under the flag of liberty, but in maturer years or old age 
live to desert it, Moses, henceforth, never swerved from the good 
part he had chosen. He pursued it onward to his grave with a 
pure, unselfish patriotism no time could weaken nor injustice and 
ingratitude cool. If ever man was tempted to abandon a cause 
which he had undertaken, it was he. Why should he have 
entered on it, and left his happy household and the quiet hills 
of Midian, to cast himself into a sea of troubles? Other actors 
have been hissed from the stage where they were once applauded ; 
other benefactors have had to complain of public ingratitude; 
and under the impulse of a temporary madness other nations 
have brought their truest patriots to the scaffold. But for forty 
long years what reward else than abuse, murmurs, opposition, 
unjust suspicion and repeated attempts on his life, did Moses 
receive from those for whom he had rejected the most splendid 
offers, on whose behalf he had made the costliest sacrifices? If 
patriotism is to be measured not only by the wrongs it bears, but 
by the sacrifices it makes, he stands far ahead of all whose deeds 
grateful nations have commemorated in monumental marble or 
poets have enshrined in song. 

Take, for example, the unselfish, for its generosity and self- 
denial the matchless, part he acted at Sinai, when the idolatry of 
Israel had awoke all the terrors of the mount, and God himself, 
provoked beyond all patience, was about to descend, to sweep 
man, woman and child from the face of the earth. u Let me 


152 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


alone,” said Jehovah, addressing Moses, who, forgetting the 
wrongs he had suffered at their hands, had thrown himself be- 
tween the people and an angry God — “ let me alone, that my 
wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them.” 
Nor was that all. " And I,” he added, “ will make of thee a 
great nation.” A splendid offer ! — yet one which, not on this 
only, but also on another occasion, Moses declined, turning twice 
from a crown to fall on his knees and pour out his whole soul to 
God in earnest prayers for the guilty people. He did more — far 
more. Deeply as he abhorred their conduct toward Jehovah, 
keenly as he felt their ingratitude to himself, he returned from 
their camp to tell God that he could not, and did not wish to, 
outlive them. “ Oh, this people,” he cried, “ have sinned a great 
sin, and have made their gods of gold ; yet now, if thou wilt for- 
give their sin!” But what if God will not? — then with such 
patriotism as, with the exception of Paul’s, never burnt in human 
bosom or burst from human lips, he exclaimed, “ If not, blot me, 
I pray thee, out of thy book !” I will sink or swim with my 
people ! If they are to perish, let me not live to see it. 

It is no disparagement to Moses’ patriotism that we are told 
that he “had respect unto the recompense of the reward.” For 
what is that but in other words to say that he walked by faith 
and not by sight, and sacrificing a present for a much greater 
though future benefit, trod the path by which all goodness and 
greatness are attained. The ardent student who, stealing hours 
from sleep, bends his pallid face and lofty brow over the mid- 
night lamp, and spends the time others give to youthful follies in 
holding converse with the mighty dead, is in the honors and 
laurels that crown such toils looking for a recompense of reward. 
The soldier who leaves home for a foreign shore to hold his 
weary watch while brothers and sisters are locked in the sweet 
arms of slumber — who, while plenty loads their table, endures 
hunger and thirst and cold and nakedness — who carries his colors 
into the smoke of battle or plants them on the summit of the 


MOSES. 


153 


deadly breach — is also, in the fame or fortune that reward such 
heroism, looking for a recompense of reward. Thus likewise do 
thousands who, to enjoy ease and a competency in the evening of 
their days, practice a rigid economy, denying themselves pleasures 
in which many others indulge. Man, unlike the lower animals, 
whose eyes are naturally bent on the ground, with his noble and 
upright form, is made to look upward and forward ; and there 
the student, the soldier, the prudent man of business, looking be- 
yond the present hour, apply to worldly matters the very prin- 
ciple that in the region of spiritual things raises a child of God 
above the world and leads him to look beyond it. To what but 
to their allowing the present to dominate over the future is the 
ruin of sinners in almost every instance to be traced? They 
sacrifice, to the gratification of a moment or an hour, their peace, 
their conscience, their purity, their souls, with a folly far beyond 
his who, selling his birthright for a mess of pottage, said, “ Be- 
hold, I am at the point to die, and what profit shall this birth- 
right be to me?” Would to God men somewhat changed Esau’s 
question, and put it thus : “ When I am at the point to die, what 
profit shall this pleasure yield to me ? It looks charming now ; 
how will it look then ? It is pleasant to anticipate ; how will it 
bear reflection — another day, on another bed, in the hour of death, 
at the bar of judgment?” 

The pity is that men will not have regard to “the recompense 
of the reward,” and allow themselves to be influenced — for both 
man and God act from motives — by high and holy motives. 
Our Lord himself, for the joy set before him, endured the cross, 
despising the shame. Nor does it detract from Moses’ piety and 
patriotism that, instead of acting from blind and ordinary im- 
pulses, he had regard to the “ recompense of the reward.” 

Nothing could be farther removed from selfishness than the 
ends he aimed at and the reward he looked for. His was not the 
spirit of such as are deterred from gross sins only by the fear of 
hell, who discover nothing in heaven to desire but the refuge it 


154 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


offers, nor in Jesus to love but the crown he bestows. Devoutest 
of men, he aimed at the glory of God ; purest of patriots, he for- 
got his own interests in those of his people. These — the divine 
glory and the good of Israel — were his aims, and their attainment 
his sufficient reward ; his motives as unselfish as the man’s who 
leaps into the boiling flood to save a drowning child, and whose 
reward is not the plaudits of the crowd that watch him from the 
banks, as, buffeting the torrent with one hand and holding up the 
dripping infant in the other, he regains the shore, but the satis- 
faction of having saved the perishing, and of seeing the mother, 
whose thanks he waits not to receive, clasping her living boy to 
her beating breast. 

But a right estimate of Moses’ patriotism cannot be formed 
unless we take into account the circumstances in which he was 
reared. These were not less unfavorable to this virtue than are 
the gloom and foul vapors of a charnel-house to the growth and 
fragrance of a flower. It is not from castles so much as cabins, 
from princes so much as from among the people, that reformers 
and patriots spring. Luther came out of a miner’s hut; and 
while the German boy sang in the streets for his bread, John 
Knox earned his by teaching. Wallace and William Tell, 
Hampden and George Washington, embarked in the cause of 
freedom with little else but their lives to lose. The noblest 
sacrifices of piety and patriotism have been made by such as had 
not a drop of noble blood in their veins. Few histories are more 
illustrative of that fact than Scotland’s. Many of her nobles 
signed the Solemn League and Covenant, but with a very few, 
though illustrious, exceptions, it was her middle classes and 
peasantry who suffered for it. It was their blood that dyed her 
scaffolds and their strong arms that kept the banner flying on her 
moors and mountains, and it was they who, hoping against hope, 
never sheathed their swords till the tyrant fled, and those liberties, 
civil and sacred, were secured which have made that country the 
boast of Britons and envy of the world. 


MOSES. 


155 


It is not commonty — and this makes Moses’ case the more re- 
markable — from among the enervating influences of wealth and 
ease and luxury that men come forth to do grand things. It is 
with them as with birds. Those birds soar the highest that have 
had the hardest upbringing. Warm and soft the pretty nest 
where, under the covering of her wings, amid green leaves and 
golden tassels and the perfume of flowers, the mother-bird of 
sweet voice, but short and feeble flight, rears her tender brood. 
Not thus are eagles reared, as I have seen on scaling a dizzy 
crag. There, their cradle an open shelf, their nest a few rough 
sticks spread on the naked rock, the bright-eyed eaglets sat ex- 
posed to the rains that seamed the hillsides and every blast that 
howled through the glen. Such the hard nursing of birds that 
were thereafter to soar in sunny skies or with strong wings cleave 
the clouds and ride upon the storm ! Even so, I thought, God 
usually nurses those amid difficulties and hardships who are des- 
tined to rise to eminence and accomplish great deeds on earth. 
Hence says Solomon, “ It is good for man to bear the yoke in 
his youth.” 

Hence, because he had had no such yoke to bear, the more 
honor to Moses, the more illustrious his patriotism. Bred in a 
palace, he espoused the cause of the people ; nursed on the lap 
of luxury, he embraced adversity ; reared in a school of despots, 
he became the brave champion of liberty ; long associated with 
oppressors, he took the side of the oppressed ; educated as her 
son, he forfeited the favor of a princess to maintain the rights of 
the poor ; with a crown in prospect, he had the magnanimity to 
choose a cross ; and for the sake of his God and Israel, abandoned 
ease, refinement, luxuries and the highest earthly honors to be a 
houseless wanderer, “ esteeming the reproach of Christ greater 
riches than the treasures of Egypt,” and “choosing rather to 
suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures 
of sin for a season.” 

That decision was as pious as patriotic ; and in Moses’ piety > 


156 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


let it be observed, we have that which was the true support and 
backbone of his patriotism. Nor in that did his case present, 
though an illustrious, a singular conjunction. Religious men 
have ever proved the truest patriots. The cause of freedom has 
owed more to them than to any other class. They have ever 
fought best and bravest in their country’s battles who sought 
another one; and strong in faith, at peace with God and sus- 
tained by hopes of immortality, were careless whether, as one of 
our martyrs expressed it, they rotted in the earth or in the air, 
died amid holy prayers or the shouts of battle and the roar of 
cannon. The greatest patriots of our own country were not its 
worldlings, its profligates, its skeptics, but devout and holy men 
— men who slept with their Bibles as well^as pistols by their 
pillow ; who carried the sacred volume to battle in their bosoms 
as well as in their hearts ; and whose tombstones, venerated by a 
pious peasantry, still stand on our moors and mountains, marked 
by the appropriate symbols of an open Bible and a naked sword. 
But never was the connection between true piety and true patriot- 
ism so eminently illustrated as in the case of Moses. He aban- 
doned all worldly interests for those of religion and of his race. 
He preferred the reproach of Christ to the riches of Egypt. 
Though thereby claiming kindred with a race of slaves, he 
counted it a higher honor to be a child of Abraham than to be 
reckoned the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. He gallantly embarked 
in the cause of his brethren, resolved to sink or swim with them. 
Type of our divine Redeemer, he bore much for them, and bore 
also much from them. Offering the highest pattern of patriotism 
sustained by piety, with what meekness he met their insolence ! — 
with what patience their provocations ! — with what forgiveness 
their unparalleled ingratitude and oft-repeated attempts upon his 
life ! — and when God, provoked to cast them off*, offered to make 
of him a great nation, with what noble generosity did he inter- 
cede on their behalf, refusing to build his own house on the ruins 
of theirs! 


MOSES. 


157 


From him we may learn how to be patriots, and how patriot- 
ism, like all other virtues, has its true root in piety. He did not 
miss the recompense of reward. He enjoys its heaven. He had 
it on earth — accomplishing the grand object of his life when, 
with victory and thanksgiving on his lips, his last gaze, ere he 
ascended to the heavenly Canaan, was fixed in dying raptures on 
the promised land ; and though no nation with the tears of bitter 
grief and the pomp of public funeral followed their great leader 
to his grave, he was buried with higher honors — as some poet 
thus finely sings : 

“By Nebo’s lonely mountain, 

On this side Jordan’s wave, 

In a vale in the land of Moab, 

There lies a lonely grave. 

And no man dug the sepulchre, 

And no man saw it e’er, 

For the angels of God upturned the sod, 

And laid the dead man there. 

“That was the grandest funeral 
That ever passed on earth, 

But no man heard the tramping 
Or saw the train go forth. 

For without sound of music, 

Or voice of them that wept, 

Silently down from the mountain’s crown 
The great procession swept. 

“Perchance the bald old eagle, 

On gray Bethpeor’s height, 

Out of his rocky eyrie 

Looked on the wondrous sight: 

Perchance the lion stalking 
Still shuns that hallowed spot, 

For beast and bird have seen and heard 
That which man knoweth not. 

“But when the warrior dieth. 

His comrades in the war, 

With arms reversed and muffled drum, 

Follow the funeral car: 


158 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


They show the banners taken, 

They tell his battles won, 

And after him lead his masterless steed. 
While peals the minute-gun. 

“Amid the noblest of the land 
Men lay the sage to rest, 

And give the bard an honored place, 
With costly marbles drest, 

In the great minster transept 
Where lights like glories fall, 

And the choir sings, and the organ rings 
Along tli’ emblazoned wall. 


“This was the bravest warrior 
That ever buckled sword; 

This the most gifted poet 
That ever breathed a word; 

And never earth’s philosopher 
Traced with his golden pen, 

On the deathless page, truths half so sage 
As he wrote down for men. 


“And had he not high honors? — 

The hillside for his pall, 

To lie in state while angels wait 
With stars for tapers tall ; 

And the dark rock pines with tossing plumes 
Over his bier to wave, 

And God’s own hand in that mountain land 
To lay him in the grave? 

‘ In that deep grave without a name, 

Whence his uncoffined clay 
Shall break again — most wondrous thought!— 
Before the judgment-day; 

And stand with glory wrapped around 
On the hills he never trod, 

And speak of the strife that won our life 
With th’ incarnate Son of God. 


MOSES. 


159 


“Oh, lonely tomb in Moab’s land f 
Oh, dark Bethpeor’s hill 1 
Speak to these anxious hearts of oura 
And teach them to be still. 

God hath his mysteries of grace, 

Ways that we cannot tell ; 

He hides them deep, like the secret sleep 
Of him he loved so well.” 


Mrs. C. P. Alexander. 









X. 

JOSHUA. 

H 5JHETHER descending from the snowy Alps, where 
% flowers bloom on its margin, to melt away before the 
l summer heat and pour from its icy cavern a turbid, 
roaring torrent, or descending through the drear deso- 
lation of Arctic regions to topple over the sea-cliff, and form the 
icebergs, the dread of mariners, that come floating like glittering 
castles and cathedrals into southern seas, the glacier is a river of 
ice — not of fluid, but of solid, water. Tossed into waves of many 
a fantastic form, and cracked with fissures that gape to swallow 
up the unwary traveler and bury him in tlieir profound blue 
depths, this remarkable object, as may be seen in the Mer de 
Glace, possesses a wonderfully firm texture. Its ice rings to a 
blow, yet it climbs up slopes, turns the edge of opposing rocks* 
forces its way through narrow gorges, and, accommodating itself 
to the curves of the valley, advances with a slow but regular rate 
of progress. How this vast, continuous mass of ice, many miles 
in length and hundreds of feet in thickness, is displaced and 
thrust forward and downward into the plains, was long, but is 
no longer, a mystery. It happens thus: Each succeeding winter 
covers the mountain-tops with fresh accumulations of snow; these, 
with their enormous weight pressing from above and behind on 
the partially plastic glacier which the frost forms out of their 

snow, force it from its birthplace to seek room elsewhere. It de- 
160 



JOSHUA. 


161 


scends, it melts, and, changed into flowing streams, carries beauty 
to smiling valleys and fertility to far distant plains. 

By an analogous process, men, who naturally cling to their 
birthplace, and often, like trees that spread their roots on a 
naked rock, cling to it the closer the poorer it is, are constrained 
to obey the original command of God, and even against their 
will, “ replenish the earth.” Those Alpine valleys which have 
furnished us with a figure furnish a remarkable example of that 
fact. Walled in by stupendous mountains, whose heads are 
crowned with eternal snows and whose precipitous sides afford 
little else than footing for pines and food for wild goats, it is a 
very limited number of families they are able to support. Sup- 
plying to their stated inhabitants but the bare necessaries of life, 
they afford no room for increase of population. In consequence 
of this, as the birth exceeds the death rate, and numbers thereby 
accumulate, their pressure, like that of the snows on the glacier, 
forces the population outward, compelling them, though with 
bleeding hearts and tender memories of their dear mountain- 
home, to seek relief in emigration — room and bread elsewhere. 
Hence, whether born in Swiss or Italian valleys, the natives of 
the Alps are met with over the whole Continent. 

The pressure of population on the ordinary means of subsist- 
ence is as much felt in a small country hemmed in by the sea as 
in one hemmed in by mountains. Unlike trees, whose bark ex- 
pands with their growth, the people cooped up in such a country 
are like a man sheathed in unelastic, iron armor. Destitute of 
energy, they remain at home, almost always on the borders, and 
frequently suffering the horrors, of famine. Educated and enter- 
prising, they seek an outlet. They go abroad ; and encountering 
alike the dangers of the sea and the hardships of the emigrant, 
they may be found in huts scattered on foreign and savage shores 
laying the foundations of future commonwealths. 

“ The latter part seems to be specially assigned of God,” say? 
Dr. Guthrie, of Scotland, “ to our country and our countrymen 
11 


162 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


Carrying with us the love of liberty, literature and science, the 
useful and also ornamental arts, and above all that word of God 
which bringeth salvation, one of the brightest prospects in the 
future of our world is, that Britons, forced by the increase of 
population and the narrow limits of their island-home to seek 
new settlements on other shores, shall be more than any other 
the chosen race to fulfill the command of Eden, and multiplying, 
‘ replenish the earth/ With the energy of the old Scandinavians 
in our blood, with a resolution that delights to encounter diffi- 
culties, with a courage that is inflamed, not quenched, by dangers, 
with our ships ploughing every sea and our commerce connecting 
us with every shore, to us more than to any other Christian 
nation God seems to commit the interests of humanity and the 
kingdom of his Son, saying, as to Israel of old, ‘ Go ye in and 
possess the land ; 7 saying, as to the first disciples, ‘ Go ye into 
all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature/ A noble 
destiny this ! — the chief purpose perhaps for which, though occu- 
pying a small, remote and stormy isle, we have grown into a 
mighty people and fill a place in the world vastly greater than 
that which our island fills on its map. Great colonists as we 
are, and greater as, with the growth of our wealth and therefore 
of our population, we are likely to be, it may prove instructive 
and also interesting to look at Joshua in the character of a colo- 
nist — the leader of the largest band that ever left their old in 
search of a new home. The emigration which he, succeeding 
Moses, conducted to a happy issue was divinely directed as well 
as divinely appointed, and from it our country may gather les- 
sons of the greatest importance, if not indeed essential to the 
right fulfillment of its splendid and holy destiny. 

“I remark, then, that the colonization of Canaan under 
Joshua was conducted in an orderly manner, on a large scale, 
and in a way eminently favorable to the happiness of the emi- 
grants and the interests of virtue and religion. 

“ We certainly cannot say the same of ours. Our system 


JOSHUA. 


163 


of emigration rends asunder the dearest ties of nature, removing 
from the side of aged parents those who should tend and support 
them. It carries aw T ay the very flower of our youth, the enter- 
prising, the stout-hearted and the strong-handed, and so leaves 
the old country burdened with an undue proportion of such as 
are feeble and infirm. Our manner of emigration is attended 
with still worse, because most immoral, effects. The largest 
proportion of such as seek a home in other lands being young 
men, there are too many women at home and too many men 
abroad. The equality of the sexes is disturbed. God’s virtuous 
order is thrown into confusion, and the consequences, both to 
the old country and its colonies, are immoral, eminently per- 
nicious. 

“ It was in another fashion that God managed the emigration 
of the Hebrews under Moses and Joshua. It presents us with a 
model we would do well to copy. The children of Israel entered 
Canaan to be settled within allotted borders — by families and by 
tribes. In their case emigration was thus less a change of per- 
sons than a change — and a happy change — of place. No broad 
seas rolled between the severed members of the same family ; 
there were no bitter partings of parents and the children they 
feared never more to see ; nor did the emigrants, with sad faces 
and swimming eyes, stand crowded on the ship’s stern to watch 
the blue mountains of their dear native land as they sank beneath 
the wave. Now, were our emigrations conducted somewhat after 
this divine model, the trees, the birds, the flowers, the skies, might 
differ from those of the old country, but with the same loved faces 
before them, the same loved voices in their ear, the same loved 
forms moving about the house, the same neighbors to associate 
and intermarry with, to rally around them in danger, to sit at 
their festive board, and at length carry their coffin to the grave, 
our emigrants would feel their new quarters to be home , and re- 
member almost without a pang, since they had brought away 
with them those who most endeared it, the glen or valley, the 


164 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


city or village, of their birth. See many of our colonists sepa- 
rated by broad seas from all they love ; strangers to one another ; 
dwelling far apart ; scattered on the lonely prairie or buried in 
the depths of gloomy forests ; doomed to rough work and learn- 
ing rougher manners; sighing for their old homes, the amenities 
of civilized and the sweet pleasures of domestic life! How 
enviable compared to theirs the circumstances of the Hebrews 
on the other side of Jordan, amid the swelling hills and green 
valleys of their adopted land ! Every homestead presents a pic- 
ture of virtuous domestic life. The aged parents, regarded with 
reverence and supported with cheerfulness, sit shadowed by vine 
and fig tree, while the father, leaving his plough in the furrow 
or leading his flock homeward at the close of day, is met by a 
merry band of children to conduct him to a home where a bright 
wife stands at the door with smiles of welcome on her face, one 
infant in her arms and another at her knee. 

“A still more important lesson than that taught by the orderly, 
just, humane and happy arrangements of this Hebrew colony is 
taught us by the care Joshua took of its religious interests. 
These, the greatest, yet considered apparently the least, of all 
interests, are sadly neglected in many of our foreign stations: 
and I have often wondered to see with what little reluctance 
Christian parents could send their children away to lands where 
more lost their religion than made their fortune. Alas for many 
of our emigrants ! — not scapegraces, but youths of fair and lovely 
promise — with none to care for their souls ! The world engrosses 
all their care. No holy Sabbath renews each week impressions 
that were fading away. Seldom visited by any minister of the 
gospel, far remote from the sound of the church-going bell, they 
grow indifferent to the claims of religion, apathy steals over them 
like a creeping palsy ; and disgracing the very name of Chris- 
tian, many addict themselves to vices which make even the 
heathen blush. Condemn the Canaanites for offering their chil- 
dren up to Moloch ! — equally cruel and costly, and far more 


JOSHUA . 


165 


guilty, are the sacrifices some parents make of theirs to Mammon. 
Talk of the Old Testament being out of date ! — it were well for 
our countrymen, and the world over so many of whose shores 
our colonies are planted, if we copied the lessons of that divine 
old Book. Whatever we do with our religion, the Hebrews did 
not leave the ark of God behind them. Kegarding it as at 
once their glory and defence, they followed it into the bed of 
Jordan, and passing the flood on foot, bore it with them into the 
adopted land. Wherever they pitched their tents they set up 
the altar and tabernacle of their God. Priests and teachers 
formed part of their train ; and making ample provision for the 
regular ministration of word and ordinance, they laid in holy and 
pious institutions the foundations of their future commonwealth. 
Here is an example to us. Our surplus population must of neces- 
sity emigrate. We are furnished in God’s good providence with 
remarkable facilities for carrying the blessings of civilization and 
a pure gospel to the ends of the earth. I know no grander 
scheme for our country and its Christian patriots than a coloniza- 
tion formed to the utmost extent, in all its orderly arrangements 
and family relationships and religious provisions, on the model 
of that which Israel followed in the land of Canaan. We have 
attempted it in the New Zealand settlements of Canterbury and 
Otago on a small and imperfect scale. But it were as much to 
our own interest as to the good of mankind that we tried it on a 
scale corresponding to our means and the world’s clamant neces- 
sities. Such colonies would relieve the old country and bless the 
new, and these, unlike the melancholy ruins of ancient kingdoms, 
depopulated regions and the graves of extinct and exterminated 
tribes, were worthy footmarks for us to leave on the sands of time 
and the soil of heathen shores. 

“ Such are some of the points in which Joshua is to be admired 
and imitated as a model colonist. Alas! while neglecting his 
example in things worthy of imitation, we have followed it but 
too closely in the one thing where it affords us no precedent to 


166 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


follow. I refer to the fire and sword he carried into the land ot 
Canaan and his extermination of its original inhabitants. We 
have too faithfully followed him in this, with no warrant, human 
or divine, to do so. Let me explain the matter. 

“The day of Jericho’s doom has come. To the amazement first, 
and afterward, no doubt, to the amusement, of its inhabitants, the 
host of Israel, followed by the ark of God and priests with sound- 
ing horns, have walked on six successive days the round of its 
walls. Its inhabitants crowding the ramparts have probably 
made merry with the Hebrews, asking, as they passed, if they 
expected to throw down stone walls with rams’ horns instead of 
battering-rams, and whether they had not walking enough in the 
wilderness these past forty years that they were taking this daily 
and very harmless turn round their city. With such gibes and 
mockery the six days passed on ; but now the seventh, the Sab- 
bath of the Lord, had come, and with it an end of their mirth 
and of Jericho itself. Smitten, when the people shouted and the 
trumpets blew, as by the blast of a mine or the shock of an earth- 
quake, its walls were to fall flat to the ground and lay it open to 
the assault. And in view of that event, these were Joshua’s in- 
structions : ‘ The city shall be accursed, it and all therein, to the 
Lord ; only Kahab the harlot shall live, she and all that are with 
her in the house.’ And committing no mistake as to the full 
and bloody import of this order, the people, it is said, ‘ utterly 
destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young 
and old.’ Nor was the slaughter at the sack of Ai, conducted 
also under Joshua’s orders, less indiscriminating and wholesale. 
There was not, we are told, a man or woman but was smitten 
with the edge of the sword, the king only excepted ; and him — 
the last survivor of these stout heathens and of a miserable crowd 
of women and children — whom the people had taken alive and 
brought captive to Joshua, Joshua carried to the smoking ruins 
of his home and hanged on a tree. These are specimens of the 
policy which the Hebrews pursued in Canaan, killing all, with- 


JOSHUA. 


167 


5ut distinction of rank or sex or age. They went to the slaughtei 
of the Canaan ites as we should to the destruction of our sins — 
their eye did not pity and their hand did not spare. 

“We naturally recoil from such scenes; and taking advantage 
of that horror of bloodshed and of the sufferings of innocents 
which God has implanted in every breast, Tom Paine and other 
ribald skeptics have made this terrible extermination a ground 
for attacking the character of Joshua and denying the divine 
authority of the Bible itself. The faith of some has staggered 
at this terrible wholesale slaughter; it has disturbed the minds 
of others; and it may be w T ell to take this opportunity of show- 
ing that, severe as the judgment was, it affords no ground what- 
ever either for traducing the character of Joshua or doubting the 
divinity of Scripture. 

“There have been monsters who delighted in cruelty and found 
music in the groans of sufferers, ruthless conquerors who put all 
without distinction to the sword, as deaf to the cries of mothers 
and the wails of infants as the steel they buried in their bowels. 
Joshua did exterminate the Canaanites, but he is not to be ranked 
with these. The kindly terms which he uses to Achan, as, bend- 
ing with pity over the guilty man, he calls him ‘my son the 
high honor he displayed in keeping faith with the Gibeonites, 
who had so cleverly entrapped him — the dauntless courage which 
he carried into battle, with which he faced the Israelites when, 
maddened on one occasion to fury, they sought his life, and with 
which also, when alone by the walls of Jericho, on seeing the 
Lord of hosts, in form of a man, standing across his path with a 
sword drawn in his hand, he went up to him with the brave 
challenge, ‘Art thou for us or for our adversaries? 9 — the piety 
which raises man above all low and brutal passions, and ever 
softens the heart it sanctifies, — these noble features in Joshua’s 
character are incompatible with a temper that could find pleasure 
in the infliction of suffering or delight in scenes of blood. It is 
not the pious, but the impious — not honorable men, but knaves 


168 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


— not the brave, but cowards — that are cruel. The judge is not 
cruel who condemns a criminal ; and placed in similar circum- 
stances, no doubt Joshua, brave, gentle and generous, was often 
agitated by the emotions of him who, seated on yonder bench of 
justice, with swimming eyes, and voice his rising feelings choke, 
pronounces on some pale, trembling wretch the dreadful doom 
of death. 

“ In his bloodiest work Joshua was acting under commission. 
His orders were clear, however terrible they read. These are his 
instructions, as given by God to Moses : * When the Lord thy 
God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess 
it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and 
the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the 
Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations 
greater and mightier than thou ; and when the Lord thy God 
shall deliver them before thee, thou shalt smite them, and utterly 
destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show 
mercy unto them : neither shalt thou make marriages with them ; 
thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter 
shalt thou take unto thy son’ — a terrible sentence clinched with 
this weighty reason, 1 for they will turn away thy sons from fol- 
lowing me, that they may serve other gods : so will the anger of 
the Lord be kindled against you, and destroy thee suddenly.’ 
There, God undertakes the whole responsibility. And be it ob- 
served that the children of Israel were blamed not because they 
did, but because they did not, exterminate the Canaanites — slay- 
ing them with the sword or driving them out of the land. The 
duty was painful and stern, but they lived to find, as God had 
warned them would happen to them, and as happens to us when 
we spare the sins of which these heathen were the type, that 
mercy to the Canaanites was cruelty to themselves. 

“But admitting that the responsibility is shifted from Joshua 
to God, how, it may be asked, are the sufferings of the Canaanites, 
their expulsion and bloody extermination from the land, to be 


JOSHUA. 


169 


reconciled with the character of God as just and good and right- 
eous? This is like many other of his acts. On attempting to 
scrutinize them, mystery meets us on the threshold. No wonder ! 
— when we feel constrained to exclaim even over a flake of snow, 
the spore of a fern, the leaf of a tree, the change of a base grub into 
a winged and painted butterfly, ‘ Who can by searching find out 
God ? who can find out the Almighty unto perfection ? It is 
higher than heaven, what can we do ? deeper than hell, what can 
we know? the measure thereof is longer than the earth and 
broader than the sea/ Dark as the judgment on Canaan seems, 
a little consideration will show that it is no greater, nor so great, 
a mystery as many others in the providence of God. 

“The land of Canaan was his — c the earth is the Lord’s, and 
the fullness thereof/ And I ask, in turn, is the sovereign Pro- 
prietor of all to be denied the right that ordinary proprietors 
claim — the right to remove one set of tenants and replace them 
by another? Besides, the inhabitants of Canaan were not only, 
so to speak, ‘ tenants at will/ but tenants of the worst descrip- 
tion. They practiced the grossest immoralities; even their re- 
ligious rites were obscene. Cruel, sensual, devilish, they were 
sinners beyond other men — a curse to the world which they cor- 
rupted with their vices and burdened with a load of guilt. And, 
therefore, unless we refuse to God the right we grant to inferior 
proprietors — that of doing what they will with their own — and 
the right also we grant to inferior governors — that of inflicting 
punishment on crime — God possessed an absolute and perfect 
authority not only to remove, but to exterminate, these idolaters 
out of the land, saying, ‘ Thou shalt smite and utterly destroy 
them/ Let it be remarked also that the Canaanites not only 
deserved, but chose, their fate. The fame of what God had done 
for the tribes of Israel had preceded their arrival in the land of 
Canaan. Thus, its guilty tenants were early warned ; got ‘ notice 
to quit ; 9 might be considered as summoned out. They refused 
to go. They chose the chances of resistance rather than quiet 


170 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


removal ; and so — for be it observed that the Israelites in the 
first instance were only ordered to cast them out — they brought 
destruction on themselves, with their own hands pulling down 
the house that buried them and their children in its ruins. 

“But the children ? — the unoffending infants? There is a mys- 
tery, I admit — an awful mystery — in their destruction, but no 
new or greater mystery here than meets us everywhere else. The 
mystery of offspring who suffer through their parents’ sins is re- 
peated daily in our own streets. Look at that poor child shiver- 
ing in the winter cold, rags on its back and cruel hunger in its 
hollow cheek, reared in deepest ignorance and driven into crime, 
doomed to a life of infamy and of misery : it suffers, the hapless 
victim of a father’s drunkenness. Look at this wasted, withered, 
sallow infant that is pining away to death and the mercy of the 
grave, with its little head wearily laid on the foul shoulders of 
one who has lost, with the heart, almost the features, of her sex : 
it suffers through a mother’s sins. Sanitary reformers tell us, 
and tell us truly, that thousands of children die year by year in 
consequence of the foul habits and foul habitations of improvi- 
dent and careless parents ; and history tells us that not thousands, 
but millions, who did not know their right hand from their left, 
have fallen victims to wars and conflagrations, to earthquakes 
and famines, to plagues and pestilences. It does not alter the 
case one whit to say that children who die of disease, for instance, 
die by the laws of Nature, while those in Canaan were put to 
death by the command of God. This is a distinction without a 
difference ; for what are the law's of Nature but the ordinances 
and will of God ? If it is consistent with his righteous govern- 
ment to deprive an infant of life by the hand of disease, it is 
equally so to do it by the edge of the sword. And thus, while 
the death of a thousand children is not more mysterious than 
that of one, there is no more mystery in all the slaughtered babes 
of Canaan than lies shrouded and shut up in the little coffin any 
sad father lays in an untimely grave. Nor is the cloud which 


JOSHUA. 


171 


here surrounds God’s throne, dark as it seems, without a silver 
lining. There is mercy in the death of all infants, the Canaanites 
iiot excepted. I feel here as I have often felt when gazing on the 
form of a dead child in some foul haunt of wretchedness and vice. 
To die is to go to heaven. To have lived had been to inherit 
the misery and repeat the crimes of parents. The sword of the 
Hebrew opens to the babes of Canaan a happy escape from misery 
and sin — a sharp but short passage to a better and purer world. 

“Thus, and otherwise, we can justify the sternest deeds of which 
Joshua has been accused. He held a commission from God to 
enter Canaan and cast out its guilty inhabitants, and, like a 
woodman who enters the forest axe in hand, to cut them down 
if they clung like trees to its soil. His conduct admits of the 
fullest vindication ; and though it did not, we should be the last 
to accuse him. Ours are not the hands to cast a stone at Joshua. 
A more painful and shameful history than the history of some at 
least of our colonies was never written. Talk of the extermina- 
tion of the Canaanites ! Where are the Indian tribes our settlers 
found roaming, in plumed and painted freedom, the forests of the 
New World ? Excepting a few scattered, degraded savages, all 
have disappeared from the face of the earth. We found Tas- 
mania with a native population, and lately the only survivors 
were a single woman and some dozen men. Unless where our 
emigrants are settled on its shores, or lonely shepherds tend their 
flocks, or the gold-digger toils for the treasures in its bowels, the 
Australian continent is becoming a solitude, its aborigines dis- 
appearing before us with the strange animals that inhabit their 
forests and form their scanty food. Equally with the timid 
Bushmen and crouching Hottentot, the brave savages of New 
Zealand are vanishing before our vices, diseases and firearms. 
Not more fatal to the Canaanites the irruption of the Hebrews 
than our arrival in almost every colony to its native population. 
We have seized their lands, and in a way less honorable, and 
even merciful, than the swords of Israel, have given them in re- 


172 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


turn nothing but a grave. They have perished before our vices 
and diseases. Our presence has been their extermination ; nor is 
it possible for a man with a heart to read many pages of our 
colonial history without feelings of deepest pity and burning 
indignation. They remind us of the sad but true words of 
Fowell Buxton. The darkest day, -said that Christian philan- 
thropist, for many a heathen tribe, was that which first saw the 
white man step upon their shores. Instead of a blessing, we 
have carried a blight with us. Professed followers of Him who 
came not to destroy but to save the world, we have entered the 
territories of the heathen w r ith fire and sword, and adding murder 
to robbery, have spoiled the unoffending natives of their lives as 
well as of their lands. 

“Had w r e any commission to exterminate ? Divine as Joshua's, 
our commission was as opposite to his as opposing poles to each 
other. These are its blessed terms : ‘ Go ye into all the world 
and preach the gospel to every creature, baptizing them in the 
name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. ’ 
Can our country and its churches read that without a blush of 
shame and a sense of guilt? Let us repent the errors of the past. 
Not so much to aggrandize our island, as to Christianize the 
world by our colonies, is the noble enterprise to which Provi- 
dence calls us. Our sailors touch at every port, the keels of our 
ships plough every sea, our manufactures are borne to every 
shore, our settlements are scattered far and wide over the whole 
face of the globe, and year by year this busy hive throws off its 
swarms to take wing in search of new settlements and wider 
homes. With its literature and language, with its hereditary 
love of adventure and indomitable vigor, with its devotion to 
liberty civil and sacred, with the truth preached from its pulpits 
and Bibles issued by millions from its printing-presses, our 
country seems called of Heaven to marshal the forces of the cross 
on the borders of heathendom, and ‘go in to possess the land.’" 

“ Go ye in to possess the land ’’ — these, if I may say so, were 


JOSHUA . 


173 


the marching orders under which Joshua and Israel entered 
Canaan ; and however unable they appeared, in point of numbers 
and ordinary resources, to cope with those who held the soil, and 
were prepared to fight like men that had their homes and hearths, 
their wives and children, to defend, yet then, as still, the measure 
of man’s ability is God’s command. While he denied them straw, 
Pharaoh required the Israelites to make bricks ; and other mas- 
ters may impose on their servants orders equally unreasonable. 
But whatever God requires of us, God will give ability to do. 
Is it to repent and be converted? is it to believe on the Lord 
Jesus Christ and be saved? is it to crucify the flesh with its 
affections and lusts? is it to abstain from evil and do good? is it 
to cast sin and depravity out of our hearts, like Canaanites out 
of the land ? — the fact that God has commanded us to do a thing 
proves that we can do it. So there is no Christian but may 
adopt the bold words of Paul, and say, “I can do all things 
through Christ which strengtheneth me.” 

Since it is so, what a noble career and rapid conquest were 
before the children of Israel ! Sweeping over Canaan like a re- 
sistless flood, they might have carried all before them. What 
difficulties could prove too great for those who had God to aid 
them? What need had they of bridge or boats, before whose 
feet the waters of Jordan fled? — of engines of war, whose shout, 
borne on the air, smote the ramparts of Jericho to the ground 
with an earthquake’s reeling shock? — of allies, who had Heaven 
on their side, to hurl down death from the skies on their panic- 
stricken enemies ? How could they lose the fruits of victory, over 
the retreat of whose foes night refused to throw her mantle, while 
the sun held the sky, nor sunk in darkness till their bloody work 
was done? What were natural difficulties or disparity of num- 
bers to those who entered Canaan with the promise, “ If ye walk 
in my statutes, and keep my commands, and do them, your 
threshing shall reach unto the vintage, and the vintage shall 
reach unto the sowing-time, and ye shall eat your bread unto the 


174 


GREAT MEN OF GOB. 


full, and dwell in your land safely; and ye snail chase your 
enemies; and they shall fall before you by the sword; and five 
of you shall chase an hundred, and an hundred of you shall put 
ten thousand to flight” ? 

With these promises Israel crossed the flood on foot; yet after 
many years, and ample time allowed to exterminate all the 
Canaanites, we find God saying to Joshua, “ Thou art old and 
stricken in years, and there remaineth yet very much land to be 
possessed.” How true, and, alas ! how sad, that these reproach- 
ful words admit of a wider than their original application — one 
involving on the part of Christ’s Church deeper sin and greater 
shame! It is a long time ago — more than eighteen hundred 
years — since our Lord brought his Church into the world, and 
conducting her to the borders of heathenism, said, “ Go ye in to 
possess the land ; go ye into all the world and preach the gospel 
to every creature ; go, and I will be with you ; go, and I will 
never leave nor forsake you.” His Church measures its exist- 
ence not by years, but centuries. It has seen hundreds of genera- 
tions swept into the tomb. Save the changeless sea and perpetual 
hills, it has seen all things changed beneath the sun, the re- 
ligions of Egypt and Greece and Rome sink into the tide of 
time, and every kingdom that flourished at its birth pass away 
from the face of the world. Venerable for its age not less than 
for its truth, the Church of Christ has had time enough to plant 
the cross on every shore and push its bloodless conquests into 
every land; yet how may Jesus, pointing to a world by much 
the larger portion of which remains under the dominion of dark- 
ness and of the devil, address her, saying, “ Thou art old and 
stricken in years, and yet there is much land to be possessed” ? 

So gigantic is the missionary work which lies before the Church 
that the old words are still appropriate, “ The field is the world.” 
With exceptions hardly deserving notice, the whole continent of 
Asia, the whole continent of Africa, and, speaking of its original 
inhabitants, the whole continent of the New World — in other 


JOSHUA. 


175 


words, much the largest portion of the globe — is “ land yet to be 
possessed.” Eighteen centuries ago Christ charged his people to 
carry the tidings of salvation to the ends of the earth, but thou- 
sands of millions have died, and hundreds of millions are living, 
who never heard his name. Was ever master so ill served, or 
hard battle and noble victory, if I may say so, so defrauded of 
their fruits ? 

-Again, it is true even of our own native country that “ there 
is much land yet to be possessed.” The eyes of a fool, says Solo- 
mon, are in the ends of the earth ; and however much we com- 
mend the zeal which has sent missionaries to the plains of India, 
the sands of Africa and Greenland’s icy shores, perhaps we lie 
somewhat open to that remark. In seeking to convert the heathen 
abroad, have we not too much overlooked the claims of those at 
home, and, like unwise generals, pushed on our conquests while 
leaving a formidable enemy in the rear? In those vast, almost 
unbroken, masses, ignorance and intemperance, whose rags and 
vices, whose neglect of religious ordinances and moral degrada- 
tion, disgrace our country and Christian name, how much land is 
there yet to possess? If we reckon how fast the non-church- 
going population of our large towns, and of many mining and 
manufacturing districts also, is increasing ; how many are sink- 
ing year by year into the godless mass that has abandoned the 
house of God and cast off all profession of religion ; and how that 
rising flood of irreligion threatens at no distant period to engulf 
throne and altar and all to which the country owes its goodness 
and its greatness, — what need is there to push on the work of 
home as well as of foreign missions, and “ enter in to possess the 
land”! 

In addressing ourselves to this task, we might take a lesson 
from the manner in which the twelve tribes took possession of 
the land of Canaan. God divided it for them into twelve dif- 
ferent parts. Giving to each a part, he said, as it were, “ This is 
your portion, fight for it : while you help your brother, and your 


176 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


brother helps you, be this your sphere for work and warfare.” 
Thus all jealousy, envy and discord were prevented, the only 
rivalry between one tribe and another being who should be fore- 
most in the work — the first to cast the heathen out of their bor- 
ders and possess the land. Had no such plan been adopted, 
what had happened? — the tribes had fallen into quarrels, and 
those who fought with the Canaanites had probably fought with 
each other. And, I have thought, it were well did the Churches 
of Jesus Christ apportion out the heathen world, and well also 
if our different denominations, laying aside all haughty exclusive- 
ness and mutual jealousies, were to divide the waste field at home. 
Then “ Judah would no longer vex Ephraim, nor Ephraim envy 
Judah,” and the Church, acting in harmony, marching in concert 
throughout all its sections, would go forth to the conquest of the 
world, to use the grand words of the old prophet, “ clear as the 
sun, fair as the moon, and terrible as an army with banners.” 

Then, animated with one spirit and aiming at one object, we 
might expect such success as blest her earliest days. What noble 
progress did she make when the dews of youth were on her ! For 
one heathen converted now, hundreds were converted then. By 
her arms Borne subdued kingdoms, but the Church by the preach- 
ing of the gospel subdued Borne herself. Nor oppression, nor 
exile, nor bloody scaffolds, nor fiery stakes, nor persecution in its 
most appalling forms, could arrest her triumphant career. She 
entered the temples of idolatry, smiting down their gods as with 
an iron mace ; she forced her way through the guards of imperial 
palaces ; she faced all danger ; she overcame all opposition ; and 
almost before the last of the apostles was called to his rest, she 
made the name of Christ greater than Caesar’s, proclaiming the 
faith and planting the cross in every region of the then known 
world. Wherever Boman commerce sailed, she followed in its 
wake; wherever the Boman eagles flew, she was there, like a 
dove, bearing the olive branch of peace. A century or two more 
of such progress, such holy energy, such self-denying zeal, and 


JOSHUA. 


177 


tlie Spirit of God continuing to bless the preaching of the word, 
the whole land had been possessed — the earth had been the 
Lord’s, and all the kingdoms of this world had become the king- 
dom of our Christ. Though it tarries now, that vision shall 
come ; and to Him whose hand is not shortened that it cannot 
save, nor his ear heavy that it cannot hear, be the prayer offered 
till the answer come, “ Awake, awake, put on thy strength, 
O arm of the Lord ; awake, as in the ancient days, and in the 
days of old.” 

12 





XI. 

CALEB. 

C is not the quantity, but the temper, of the metal 
which makes a good sword, nor is it mere bulk, but a 
large measure of nervous and muscular force, which 
makes a strong man ; and in accordance with the saying 
of Napoleon I., that “ moral is to physical power as three to one,” 
the wars of all ages have proved that success in battle does not 
turn so much on the multitude as on the morale , on the numbers 
as on the character, of the troops. 

The triumph of the Prussians, for example, in their brief but 
bloody contest with Austria, and in their more recent victory 
over France, was due less to the superiority of their arms than 
of their education, intelligence and religion ; under Providence, 
these, not numbers or the needle-gun, turned the fortunes of the 
campaign. To the same or similar moral causes Oliver Crom- 
well owed his remarkable success. Fanatics or not, right or 
wrong in their religious and political views, his troops were 
thoughtful men, of strict and even severe manners, within whose 
camps there was little swearing, but much psalm-singing — soldiers 
who, if they did not, because they could not in conscience, honor 
the king, feared God. It was from their knees in silent prayer, 
or from public assemblies held for worship, those men went to 
battle, who almost never fought but they conquered, bearing 
down in the shock of arms the very flower and pride of England’s 
chivalry. By heroic deeds which history records, and John Mil- 

178 



CALEB. 


179 


ton sang, and all denominations of Protestant Christians agree in 
admiring and approving, the valleys of Piedmont teach the same 
lesson. Strong were their mountain fastnesses; the dizzy crag 
they shared with the eagle; the narrow gorge, where, with a 
roaring torrent on this side and a dark frowning precipice on 
that, one brave man, spear in hand, or with boys and women at 
his back to load the rifles, could hold the pass against a thousand. 
Yet the salvation of the Waldenses did not lie in “the munition 
of rocks.” To the morale which endured three centuries of the 
crudest persecution, turned every rock into a monument, faced 
death on every meadow and gave to every village its roll of 
martyrs, was chiefly due the illustrious spectacle of a handful of 
men defending their faith and country against the arms of Savoy 
and the persecutions of Pome. It was this which braced them 
for the struggle, and repeatedly rolled back on the plains of Italy 
the bleeding fragments of the mighty armies that invaded their 
mountain homes. 

So long as we cannot dispense with locks and keys to protect 
our goods from thieves, nor with police to preserve our persons 
from assault and our homes from housebreakers, it is vain to 
hope that we can dispense with the means of protecting our 
country from those who, though dignified with the names of 
conquerors, are nothing else than thieves and murderers. Alex- 
ander, Caesar, Napoleon, differed from the felons we send to 
prison or consign to the gallows only in that they plundered not 
houses, but kingdoms, and on bloody battle-fields, strewed with 
the bodies of mangled thousands, committed not solitary but 
wholesale slaughter. 

But while we may justify a standing array, I would like to 
ask what Christian man can justify those arrangements which, in 
so many respects, convert it into a standing immorality. This 
is a subject within our sphere, as Christians and patriots, to notice. 
We have here an enormous evil, which every lover of God and 
of the souls of men and of his country should seek to amend. I 


180 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


know few things that call so loudly for reform as the unfavorable 
circumstances in which we place our soldiers, so far as regards 
especially their highest, their moral and religious, interests. 

CALEB’S FIDELITY. 

Fidelity is one of the first properties of a soldier; and it were 
well that every good cause, and especially that of Christ, could 
boast of such fidelity as gallant men have often shown in the 
ranks of war. Mere boys have bravely carried the colors of their 
regiment into battle, and to save them from falling into the hands 
of the enemy they have been known, when they themselves fell, 
to wrap them around their bodies and die within their encrim- 
soned folds. An incident more heroic still occurred on one of 
those fields where Austria lately suffered disastrous defeat. 
When the bloody fight was over and the victors were removing 
the wounded, they came on a young Austrian stretched on the 
ground, whose life was pouring out in the red streams of a 
ghastly wound. To their astonishment, he declined their kind 
services. Recommending others to be removed, he implored 
them, though he might still have been saved, to let him alone. 
On returning some time afterward they found him dead — ail his 
battles o’er. But the mystery was explained. They raised the 
body to give it burial, and there, below him, lay the colors of his 
regiment. He had sworn not to part with them ; and though he 
clung to life and tenderly thought of a mother and sisters in 
their distant home, he would not purchase recovery at the price 
of his oath and the expense of a soldier’s honor — “ he was faith- 
ful unto death.” 

There was nothing in Pompeii, that most weird and wonderful 
of all cities — “ city of the dead,” as Walter Scott kept repeating 
to himself when they bore the shattered man through its silent 
streets — that invested it with a deeper interest to me than the 
spot where a soldier of old Rome displayed a most heroic fidelity. 
That fatal day on which Vesuvius, at whose feet the city stood, 


CALEB. 


181 


burst out into an eruption that shook the earth, poured torrents 
of lava from its riven sides, and discharged, amid the noise of a 
hundred thunders, such clouds of ashes as filled the air, produced 
a darkness deeper than midnight, and struck such terror into all 
nearts that men thought not only that the end of the world had 
come and all must die, but that the gods themselves were ex- 
piring — on that night a sentinel kept watch by the gate which 
looked to the burning mountain. Amid unimaginable confusion 
and shrieks of terror mingling with the roar of the volcano, and 
cries of mothers who had lost their children in the darkness, the 
inhabitants fled the fatal town, while the falling ashes, loading 
the darkened air and penetrating every place, rose in the streets 
till they covered the house-roofs, nor left a vestige of the city but 
a vast silent mound, beneath which it lay unknown, dead and 
buried, for nearly seventeen hundred years. Amid this fearful 
disorder the sentinel at the gate had been forgotten : and as Eome 
required her sentinels, happen what might, to hold their posts 
till relieved by the guard or set at liberty by their officers, he 
had to choose between death and dishonor. Pattern of fidelity, he 
stood by his post. Slowly but surely the ashes rise on his manly 
form; now they reach his breast, and now covering his lips > they 
choke his breathing. He also was “ faithful unto death.” After 
seventeen centuries they found his skeleton standing erect in a 
marble niche, clad in its rusty armor — the helmet on his empty 
skull and his bony fingers still closed upon his spear. And next 
almost to the interest I felt in placing myself on the spot where 
Paul, true to his colors when all men deserted him, pleaded before 
the Roman tyrant, was the interest I felt in the niche by the city 
gate where they found the skeleton of one who, in his fidelity to 
the cause of Caesar, sets us an example of faithfulness to the cause 
of Christ — an example it were for the honor of their Master that 
all his servants followed. 

This property of a good soldier was eminently illustrated by 
Caleb. One of the twelve heads of the tribes of Israel whom 


182 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


Moses selected to spy out the promised land, he entered Canaan 
along with Joshua and the other ten, traveling from its southern- 
most to its northern border. In this expedition his fidelity and 
courage do not appear to have been put to the test. Nor is it 
difficult to explain how this happened and they were able to 
execute their commission without being suspected of the character 
or suffering the fate of spies — safe from the dangers to which the 
two men were exposed who, forty years afterward, were sent into 
Jericho. 

Caleb and his associates entered the land of Canaan little more 
than twelve months after Israel had left that of Egypt. At this 
time no report of what had happened there seemed to have 
reached the Canaanites. But when the host, after wandering in 
the wilderness for forty years, returned to the borders of the 
promised land, they found its inhabitants — as well they might 
be — all on the alert, the whole country alarmed by reports, 
which fame would not lessen but rather exaggerate, of how the 
host that approached their borders had been miraculously sus- 
tained in the wilderness, and how, aided by Jehovah, they had 
trodden in the dust the greatest kings and nations that had 
attempted to oppose their progress. It was not till Caleb re- 
turned to the camp of Israel that, as I proceed now to show, he 
met with anything to put his fidelity to the test and bring it out, 
an illustrious example to future ages. 

The news that the spies are returning flies like wildfire through 
the tents and calls forth all the people. There they come, browned 
with the sun and dust of travel. They bring proofs of the fer- 
tility of the soil in the fruits which they hold in their hands, and 
in that one bunch of grapes, a cluster so weighty that it requires 
two men to carry. The camp is full of joy, and every ear intent, 
as, addressing Moses in the hearing of the people, the spies say, 
“We came into the land whither thou sentest us, and surely it 
floweth with milk and honey ; and this is the fruit of it.” Alas ! 
their joy is short-lived. How are their hearts struck with dread, 


CALEB. 


183 


ind the hopes they have cherished changed into blank despair, as 
the spies go on to say, “ Nevertheless the people be strong, and 
the cities are walled, and very great adding, with voices that 
trembled at the recollection of their gigantic forms, “ and we saw 
the children of Anak there” ! The children of Anak ! At this 
news the whole congregation grows pale with terror. Fear sits 
on every face, and expresses itself in a low murmuring wail that, 
unless it meets a timely check, will ere long break out into open 
mutiny. At this crisis Caleb interposes — not to deny the state- 
ment of his associates, but to repudiate the cowardly conclusion 
they suggested and the people accepted. Faithful to the cause 
of God, he rushes to the front to deliver himself of words full of 
faith and courage. They sound like a battle trumpet. No doubt 
the Canaanites are strong; their walls are high, their ranks led 
on by giant warriors, the formidable sons of Anak. Neverthe- 
less, as one who knew that He who was with them was greater 
than all who could be against them, Caleb cries out, “ Let us go 
up at once and possess it ; we are well able to overcome it.” 

So he spake. But ere Joshua — if we may judge from the nar- 
rative — has time to second him and echo this heroic address, the 
other spies interpose. Now painting matters darker than at first, 
they complete the panic, saying, “ All the people that we saw in 
it are men of great stature ; and there we saw the giants, the sons 
of Anak ; and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so 
we were in theirs.” At these words, as if a thunderbolt or shell 
had dropped among them, the multitude suddenly disperse. 
Through the livelong night weeping fills the camp; nor does 
joy come in the morning. They have abandoned themselves to 
despair. Regretting that they had ever left the land of Egypt, 
they resolve to retrace their steps. They cast blame on God, and 
give way to such grief and rage and wild, blind fury that Moses 
and Aaron are confounded. Knowing neither what to do nor 
how to turn the people from their mad purpose, they fall on their 
faces and lie on the ground, as if they said, If you will go back 


184 


GREAT men of god . 


to Egypt, it is over our bodies you shall go. At this moment, 
though it was like laying hands on the mane of a raging lion, 
Caleb, supported by Joshua, once more steps forward, and re- 
gardless of a life the people had armed themselves with stones to 
destroy, he reproaches their cowardice, saying, “ Rebel not ye 
against the Lord, neither fear ye the people of the land ; for they 
are bread to us, their defence is departed from them. The Lord 
is with us; fear them not.” Another moment, and, his life bat- 
tered out of him by a shower of stones, Caleb had fallen a sacri- 
fice to his own fidelity and the people’s fury. But suddenly, in 
the form of some brilliant, dazzling, intolerable light — the well- 
known symbol of the divine Presence — “ the glory of the Lord 
appears in the tabernacle before all the children of Israel.” They, 
not Caleb and Joshua, nor Moses and Aaron, are in peril now. 
God is ready to destroy them, and they had been swept from the 
face of the earth but for Moses’ earnest and timely intercession. 
They are doomed for their sin to wander forty years in the wil- 
derness, until the carcasses of all who were over twenty years of 
age on leaving Egypt have fallen there. God forgives them. 
Merciful and gracious, he forgets their offence, but not Caleb’s 
fidelity. “ Surely,” he says, “ they shall not see the land, but 
my servant Caleb, because he had another spirit with him and 
hath followed me fully, him will I bring into the land whereinto 
he went; and his seed shall possess it.” Even so shall it be with 
all who, faithful to the sacred interests of their heavenly Master, 
prove themselves good soldiers of Jesus Christ. Bemembering 
their fidelity in the hour of trial — how they stood by his cause, 
resisted temptations, by faith crucified the flesh, by the blood of 
the covenant overcame the world, how they denied themselves 
but not him, how they were of “ another spirit” from the mass 
of mere professors, and how in purpose, if not always in practice, 
they “ followed the Lord fully” — them also will he bring into the 
land whither they go, the ransomed of the Lord, a sacramental 
Host, pilgrims to the heavenly Canaan. 


CALEB. 


185 


CALEB’S COURAGE. 

For that courage — true, calm courage — which does not lie in 
nsensibility to danger nor in the violent animal passion which 
may bear a coward forward as a whirlwind does the dust or a 
wave the sea-weed on its foaming crest, Caleb presents the very 
model of a soldier. How bravely he bears himself when the 
other spies prove traitors ! With fire in his eye and resolution 
seated on his brow, he steps forth to cry, “ Let us go up at once 
and possess the land ! Away with these coward fears !” The 
speech this, be it observed, not of one who was to guard the 
camp or bring up the rear. Judah’s place is in the front of 
battle. The bloody wave breaks first on that gallant tribe, and 
of all its warriors, first on Caleb, its prince and head. Nor was 
this bold proposal to face and fight the sons of Anak an empty 
boast, a mere bravado. Forty years thereafter his courage was 
put to that test, the portion of the land assigned him, at his own 
request, being held by the giant race whose descendant, Goliath 
of Gath, struck terror into the boldest hearts in Israel, as he went 
forth vaporing before their host, till he fell by the shepherd’s 
sling, defying the armies of the living God. It was from the 
hands of giants Caleb wrung his inheritance. Undaunted by 
their towering stature, he met them, sword to sword and foot to 
foot, in the bloody field, the God in whom he trusted inspiring 
his heart with such courage and endowing his arm with such 
strength that they succumbed before his blows, their armor 
loudly clashing, and the very earth shaking in their fall. 

The source of Caleb’s courage, of a bravery so admirable and 
dauntless, is not far to seek. He had faith in God ; therefore he 
did not fear the face of man, though that man were a giant, nor 
of death itself. From the same lofty source, and none other, the 
soldier of the cross, he who fights with foes more formidable than 
giants — the devil, the world and the flesh, that trinity of evils — 
is to draw his courage. No grace more necessary than that in 
one who would do his duty to Jesus and to his cause. Courage 


186 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


to speak for Christ everywhere, and act for Christ always, is a 
grace of the highest value, yet one in which, alas ! many a good 
man, to the dishonor of his Master and the loss of others, has 
been sadly wanting. The apostle Paul possessed it; and what 
he himself possessed in a degree so eminent, he enforced on his 
converts, saying, “ Add to your faith virtue,” or, as it were better 
translated, “ courage.” No greater bravery, indeed, in battle- 
fields than what the Christian may require ! More of it may be 
needed to face the jeers of an ungodly world than a blazing bat- 
tery of cannon. 

In illustration of this, hear what a nobleman of ancient family 
and high rank and still higher piety has written in a very precious 
record which was lately given to the public. “ I felt,” he says, 
“ that salvation must be sought and attained, though the path to 
it lay through fire and water, and that no hardships were worth 
a moment’s consideration in comparison of so great a prize. In 
the same manner the pursuits of my life hitherto appeared utterly 
frivolous. They could not advance me one step on the road to 
heaven. I resolved to make an entire change in my life, to 
spend the whole day in the service of God and devote myself en- 
tirely to the promotion of his glory. Yet how to begin I knew 
not. I felt I ought earnestly to address every one I met, begin- 
ning with my own servants ; that I ought to speak out, and not 
sneak into heaven by the back door. For several days, however, 
I did nothing. I shrunk from the idea of declaring myself, and 
dreaded the remarks of relatives, acquaintances and servants. I 
seriously debated with myself, since society presented such great 
difficulties in our way, whether we should not leave all and fly 
with our children to a distant land, where, living quite unknown, 
we might commence our new life with fewer outward impedi- 
ments, and spend our days in prayer, praise and preaching to 
others Christ’s gospel of salvation. It was in my mind to give 
up our inheritance, reserving only enough for our bare support, 
and taking leave of all our connections, to burn, as it were, our 


CALEB. 


187 


ships behind us, and dying to this world, to live entirely for the 
next. To the objection that we should be deserting the station 
in which God had placed us, I urged that our first duty is the 
care of our own souls. I compared it to Lot flying out of Sodom. 
In giving up my hereditary rank and riches, I considered that I 
should injure no one. My children, being brought up in total igno- 
rance of their origin, would have no cause for regret ; and if religion 
be true, they would be incalculable gainers, since riches (if Christ 
be an authority) are a great hindrance in the way to heaven. For 
several days I debated this question with myself, and one con- 
sideration alone determined my conclusion on it in the negative. 
I could not reconcile it with my duty to leave my aged father.” 

These are the touching words of one who lived to openly avow 
his change and confess Christ before the world. He added to his 
faith courage. His circumstances needed it, and so do those of 
the humblest Christians. Nor shall we go without it if we seek 
God’s help. He that gave Nicodemus, who once came stealing 
to Jesus under the cloud of night, courage to perform the last 
kind offices to the dead — He who gave the disciple that denied 
his Master before a woman courage to confess him before all the 
Jews and charge home on them the guilt of his innocent blood — 
He who turns the pliant sapling into a tree, that, with roots 
wrapped around the rocks, lifts its head on high and defies the 
storm, — He will make his feeblest followers “valiant for the 
truth” — bold to avow themselves the followers of Jesus, and say, 

“I’m not ashamed to own my Lord, 

Or to defend his cause, 

Maintain the glory of his cross, 

And honor all his laws. 

“ Jesus, my Lord, I know his name, 

His name is all my boast; 

Nor will he leave my soul to shame, 

Nor let my hope be lost.” 



XII. 

GIDEON. 

VALLEY abandoned to solitude, however picturesque 
and beautiful, wears a melancholy air. Its loneliness 
and silence are so oppressive as well as impressive that 
we would be glad to hear a dog bark or a cock crow, 
or in the blue smoke that wreathes up against gray crag or brown 
hillside see some sign of human life. The feelings, allied to sad- 
ness, such a scene produces are deepened by the green spots we 
ever and anon alight on, marked by nettles, a clump of decaying 
trees and some crumbling ruins. These ruins were once happy 
homes ; children played on that daisy-sward ; gray patriarchs sat 
under the shadow of these aged trees ; hospitable fires blazed on 
these cold hearths ; and from these roofless walls the voice of joy 
and gladness, of praise and prayer, echoed in other days. 

But the land of Israel, when Gideon was raised up to be its 
deliverer, presented a yet sadder aspect. The forests into which 
some, and the idol groves into which others, of their beautiful 
hill-sides had been turned, were indications of departure from 
the pure faith of their fathers. The “evil heart of unbelief” 
and the fascinations and wiles of the daughters of the land, had 
turned these hitherto God-favored and God-protected sons of Ja- 
cob into worshipers of Baal and Ashtaroth, whose vile services 
they attempted to unite with the worship of Him who had said, 
“ I will not give mine honor to another.” In consequence, the hap- 
py estate which had thus far been the lot of the Israelites was 



GIDEON. 


189 


now at an end, and in place of fields of waving grain and fruit- 
ful vineyards, their land became a scene of desolation, presenting 
an aspect sadder than roofless ruins and deserted villages. The 
houses were there, but no children played about the doors ; the 
fields, but they bore no crops ; the pastures, but they fed no cattle ; 
the hills, but they bleated with no flocks of sheep ; and the peo- 
ple also, more unfortunate than the peasantry of Europe, whom 
other lands receive when their own casts them out, possessed no 
homes but such as they found in caves and dens and mountain 
crags. To this extremity had the country been reduced by the 
invasions of the hosts of Midian. With occasional periods of re- 
laxation, and exceptional cases such as Gideon’s, during seven 
long, weary years its wretched inhabitants had suffered — for dis- 
ease always treads on the heels of want — the threefold scourge of 
war, pestilence and famine. 

It were difficult to imagine a more painful contrast than that 
between the condition of Israel in these days and the prospects 
of their fathers on entering the land of Canaan. “ Blessed,” said 
Moses in his parting address to the tribes before they entered the 
promised land — “ blessed shalt thou be in the city, and blessed 
shalt thou be in the field ; blessed shall be the fruit of thy body, 
and the fruit of thy ground, and the fruit of thy cattle, the in- 
crease of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep ; blessed shall be 
thy basket and thy store ; blessed shalt thou be when thou comest 
in, and blessed shalt thou be when thou goest out. The Lord shall 
cause thine enemies that rise up against thee to be smitten before 
thy face; and the Lord shall command the blessing upon thee in 
all that thou settest thine hand unto.” What a shower of bless- 
ings in the form of promises ! and if anything could have com- 
forted the people for the loss of Modes, it was the prospect of 
entering on such a splendid career of peace and prosperity as this 
picture presented. Nothing more beautiful than the picture; 
but, alas ! contrasted with the future sorrows and sufferings of 
the nation, apparently not more unsubstantial the visions of a 


190 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


dream — the brilliant arch that vanishes in the storm whose dark 
cloud it spans. It seemed as if the people had “ looked for peace, 
but no good came ; and for a time of health, and behold trouble.” 
No wonder, therefore, that when the angel appeared to Gideon 
by the oak at Ophrah, accosting him with these hopeful words, 
“The Lord is with thee, thou mighty man of valor,” his answer 
expressed the deepest disappointment. Looking around him on 
the desolation of his country, and at that moment in terror lest 
the Midianites should appear before he had got his corn threshed 
and buried out of their sight, no wonder that, in such afflictive 
circumstances, he returned this melancholy reply, “ 0 my Lord, 
if the Lord be with us, why then is all this befallen us ? — the 
Lord hath forsaken us, and delivered us into the hands of the 
Midianites.” 

But whatever reasons Gideon and his countrymen had to 
mourn, they had none to murmur or cast blame on God. He 
had not failed in one jot or tittle of all he spake to their fathers 
by the lips of Moses; nor did their deserted homesteads and 
ravaged fields and empty stalls and silent hills belong to those 
mysteries of Providence it baffles the wisest to solve. 

First, as to the question, “ If the Lord be with us, why hath 
this befallen us?” that was easily answered. It finds a solution 
— a clear, sufficient answer — in the words with which Moses pre- 
faced his series of beatitudes, the nail on which that string of 
pearls was suspended. “All these blessings,” he said, “shall 
come on thee and overtake thee, if thou shalt hearken unto the 
voice of the Lord thy God.” They had not done so, nor was 
proof of that far to seek. It rose there, near by the threshing- 
floor, insulting God, in an altar erected to the worship of Baal, 
though the Lord had commanded them, saying, “Thou shalt 
have no other gods before me.” 

Secondly, as to Gideon’s complaint, “ The Lord hath forsaken 
us,” their trials proved the contrary. They are bastards, not 
sons, that grow up without chastisement ; they are common, not 


GIDEON. 


191 


precious, stones that escape the lapidary's wheel ; they are wild, 
not garden, trees that never bleed beneath the pruning-knife. 
“Whom God loveth,” says the apostle, “he chasteneth, and 
scourgeth every son that he receiveth.” Others, I may remark, 
besides Gideon, but with less reason or excuse, have fallen into 
his mistake. Nor when blow succeeds blow, and trials, like 
foaming waves, break on the back of trials, and we look on them 
through the dim and distorting medium of our tears, is the com- 
plaint unnatural, “ The Lord hath forgotten me, my Lord hath 
forsaken me.” Nevertheless it is a mistake, and a great mistake 
— a feeling that should be resisted by the people of God, since it 
tends to defeat his gracious purpose, and aggravate instead of 
alleviate the sufferings by which he seeks to sanctify and draw 
them more closely to himself. God has no other object than 
these in afflicting his children; nor is it possible for fancy to 
imagine anything more touching or tender than the manner in 
which, as one hurt by their unworthy suspicions, he replies, 
“ Can a mother forget her sucking child, that she should not have 
compassion on the fruit of her womb ? She may forget : yet will 
not I forget thee. I have graven thee on the palms of my hands, 
and thy walls are continually before me.” 

To prepare the ground for sowing, the husbandman, if I may 
say so, afflicts it — he drives a ploughshare through its bosom and 
tears asunder its clods with iron teeth. Similar was the purpose 
for which God afflicted Israel by the hand of Midian. That 
object accomplished, as the sower follows the ploughman to cast 
seed into the furrows his share has drawn, God sent a prophet to 
preach to his people. With a rock for his pulpit, with repent- 
ance for his text, and for his church some mountain hollow, 
where ghastly crowds, creeping from their caves, assembled to 
hear him, this preacher set forth their sins as the cause of their 
sorrows, calling them to repentance. Nor, such a forerunner of 
Gideon as John Baptist was of Christ, did he call in vain. Tears 
course down the furrows of famished cheeks. The voice of suf- 


192 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


fering ascends to heaven sanctified by the voice of sorrow; con- 
fessions of penitence mingle witn groans of pain ; the caves and 
dens they had turned into dwellings they turn into oratories; 
and now another ear than the rocks hears their prayers — the cry, 
“How long, O Lord, how long?” The set time is come. Past 
is that darkest hour which precedes the dawn. Heaven’s gate is 
thrown open, and an angel, leaving it, cleaves his way earthward 
to raise up in Gideon one who should break the yoke of Midian, 
and rise the deliverer of the oppressed. 

Such was the order of God’s government and dealings then, 
and such, it is important to observe, it is still. The people of 
Israel were to be relieved of their sorrows, but not till they had 
repented of their sins. Penitence must precede peace. Sins not 
repented of are sins not forgiven ; and since true joy is as cer- 
tainly born of godly sorrow as bright days of gray mornings, or 
rather day itself of the dark womb of night, they, therefore, who 
fancy themselves forgiven the sins which they have never sor- 
rowed for, only deceive themselves, saying, “ Peace, peace ! when 
no peace is to be found.” 

The story of Gideon is written for our instruction. Nor will 
it have been written in vain if, seeking to obtain deliverance 
from the bondage of sin and, to use Paul’s words, “ work out our 
salvation,” we take him as a pattern. Copying and cultivating 
the qualities which contributed so materially to his success, let us 
enter on our own battles in the spirit of his famous cry, “ The 
6word of the Lord and of Gideon.” 

Gideon teaches us to be humble and self-distrustful. In his 
history the curtain rises on a scene of obscure and humble life — 
a threshing-floor in some sequestered nook, where we see a man, 
to beat out the grain, driving bullocks round and round over 
some corn. It has happily escaped the pillage of the Midianites, 
and he intends to conceal it in the ground for further safety. 
This countryman is Gideon, the future deliverer and judge of 
Israel, and that his humble task. Fired with ambition, it might 


GIDEON ; 


193 


have been natural for him to leave such obscure employments to 
others, and panting to deliver his country and also distinguish 
himself, aim at something better suited to his talents and posi- 
tion. “What manner of men were they whom ye slew at Tabor ?” 
was his question to the conquered and captive kings, Zebah and 
Zalmunna. “As thou art, so were they; each one resembled the 
children of a king,” was their answer. Now this answer, though 
fatal to themselves (for their victims were Gideon’s brethren), 
presents his case as one of those where the body seems to take 
form from the mind it lodges, and to reveal, by a certain noble- 
ness of bearing and expression, the greatness of the soul within. 
Yet Gideon, though belonging — if we may judge from this — to 
the order of Nature’s nobility, abandoned himself to no dreams 
of ambition, but was called of God from the quiet, diligent and 
contented discharge of the humblest duties to honors and use- 
fulness he never dreamed of. If God should call him to a 
higher place, well ; if not, also well. In this combination of a 
humble disposition and a brilliant destiny, Gideon was by no 
means singular. He is one of a constellation of men who have 
emerged from obscurity and the contented discharge of humble 
offices to shine as stars. Christ’s call, for example, found Matthew 
at the receipt of custom ; Simon and Andrew, James and John, 
mending their nets on the shores of Galilee. Moses got his call 
when discharging the duties of a shepherd in the land of Midian , 
and David his, when, a dutiful son, he herded his father’s flocks 
on the hills of Bethlehem. It is the busy, not the idle, not such 
as are dissatisfied, but contented with their lot and do its duties 
well, whom God usually calls to posts of honor and of distin- 
guished usefulness. 

“Blessed are the poor in spirit” — the astonishing exclamation 
with which our Lord opened his Sermon on the Mount, and at 
once took his hearers captive — finds no more appropriate illus- 
tration than Gideon offers. “The Lord be with thee, thou 
mighty man of valor” — the words with which the heavenly 
13 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


194 

messenger first accosted him — had fallen on a self-confident and 
ambitious spirit like a spark on a train of gunpowder, setting it 
in a blaze, firing it instantly. And had such been Gideon’s 
temper, to the call, “ Go in this thy might, and thou shalt save 
Israel; have not I sent thee?” how had he leapt up, and casting 
away the ox-goad to draw the sword, with the blare of trumpet 
summoned his country to arms! But a humble, modest, self- 
distrustful man, he is overwhelmed with the magnitude of the 
task. Measuring it and himself, the difference is such that he 
deems it hopeless; and eager to escape from an enterprise in 
which he can anticipate nothing but certain failure, he cries, 
“ O my Lord, wherewith shall I save Israel ? Behold, my 
family is poor in Manasseh ; and I am the least in my father’s 
house!” Few have so thrust office and honor away. Nor does 
he venture to accept them till assured by a miracle that his call 
is from heaven — till he sees fire flash from the cold rock, and the 
angel, at whose touch it came, leap on the altar and ascend to 
heaven in its flames. 

History offers many remarkable parallels, but none perhaps 
more remarkable than that between the self-distrust and diffi- 
dence of Moses and the self-distrust and diffidence of Gideon. 
In this they present a remarkable and instructive contrast to the 
ready confidence with which the disciples of our Lord — by nature 
very inferior men — responded to his call. It was from no aver- 
sion to the work that both Moses the leader, and Gideon the 
deliverer, of Israel shrunk from it, but from the very humble 
estimate they had formed of their own powers. The disciples 
seem to have been troubled with no such scruples, but the con- 
trary. Their mutual jealousies and unseemly strifes for prece- 
dence argue a self-sufficient spirit. So strong was this in Simon 
that swelling w T aves and roaring storm were not formidable enough 
to deter him from an attempt to rival his Master and also walk 
upon the sea — in Thomas, that when Jesus, by repairing to 
Bethany, was to put his life in jeopardy, troubled with no mis- 


GIDEON. 


195 


givings, he said, et us go also and die with him”— in the 
whole hand, that amid the dangers of that ever-memorable night 
in which our Lord was betrayed, they made professions heroic 
and brave as Peter’s, declaring, “ We will die with thee rather 
than deny thee.” 

But the contrast between the spirit and temper in which Moses 
and Gideon on the one hand, and the disciples on the other, 
entered on their respective vocations, is not more remarkable 
than that between the manner in which they filled them. With 
Moses returning to the court of Pharaoh to beard the haughty 
tyrant, where he sits armed with imperial power and surrounded 
by those that obey his nod, compare Simon Peter, cowering be- 
fore a woman’s eye, and skulking away from observation and her 
questions into the darkness of the night. With Gideon advancing 
at the head of a handful of men against the whole host of Midian, 
or hanging in pursuit on their flying columns, compare the dis- 
ci pies as, struck with terror, they scatter and fly from the garden 
where they have left their Master a prisoner in the hands of his 
cruel enemies. From these cases, how should we learn that our 
strength lies in our weakness — in our sense of it — in what fosters 
that frame of mind which Paul expressed by this remarkable 
paradox, “When I am weak, then am I strong” ! The self-dis- 
trust which cries to God for help and works out salvation with 
fear and trembling — which, casting away all confidence in an 
arm of flesh, clings to the arm of Jesus — which says with Moses, 
“ Unless thou go with us, let us not go up,” and with Jacob, 
“I will not let thee go unless thou bless me” — like the army 
which, drawn out in battle array, was seen to first fall on its 
knees in prayer, — this is the sure presage, not of defeat, but of 
victory. In the self-distrust which prompts to prayer, and makes 
a man cast himself on God, and substitute for human weakness 
the power of a divine omnipotence, we may say, as Samson did 
of his unshorn locks, “In that our great strength lies.” 

Gideon teaches us the importance of having our faith strength-' 


196 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


ened. Any means Gideon possessed for accomplishing the work 
he had undertaken were, humanly speaking, altogether inade- 
quate. He had not a chance of success, if it could be said with 
truth, “ There is no hope for him in God.” Faith being then, as 
faith is still, the medium of connection between human weakness 
and divine power, it was his mainstay. He was thrown entirely 
on its strength. The ship does not ride the storm otherwise than 
by the hold her anchor takes of the solid ground. By that, which 
lies in the calm depths below, as little moved by the waves that 
swell and roll and foam above as by the winds that lash them 
into fury, she resists the gale and rides the billows of the stormiest 
sea. But her safety depends on something else also. When masts 
are struck and sails are furled, and, anchored off reef or rocky 
shore, she is laboring in the wild tumult for her life, it likewise 
lies in the strength of her cable and of the iron arms that grasp 
the solid ground. By these she hangs to it, and thus not only 
the firm earth, but their strength also, is her security. Let the 
flukes of the anchor or strands of the cable snap, and her fate is 
sealed. Nothing can avert it. Powerless to resist and swept for- 
ward by the sea, she drives on ruin, and hurled against an iron 
shore, her timbers are crushed to pieces like a shell. And what 
anchor and cable are to her, the faith by which man makes God’s 
strength his own was to Gideon, and is still to believers in their 
times of trial. 

Aware of that, and teaching us by his example a lesson of the 
highest practical importance, Gideon prepared for his enterprise 
by seeking to have his faith strengthened, deeming that of such 
transcendent consequence as to ask, what God kindly granted, 
a miracle — ay, two miracles — to strengthen it. The time was 
coming to him — as probably in sore temptations and heavy trials, 
and certainly in the awful hour of death, it shall come to us — 
when he would have to stand face to face with difficulties no 
mere human energy could overcome, and dangers no mere human 
fortitude could meet. There could be no help for him then in 


GIDEON. 


197 


man, and should his faith fail, there was Done in God. Before 
*he terrible figure of the giant, and in other such circumstances, 
David said, “ I will remember the years of the right hand of the 
Most High and so, to feed his courage from a similar source, 
Gideon wished for something to remember and to rest on, as 
proving that God was with him of a truth — something to shine 
like a star when the night was at the darkest — something to feel 
like a rock below his feet when the flood was highest. 

For that purpose, casting himself on the kindness and com- 
passion of God, he spreads out a fleece on the floor, saying, “ If 
thou wilt save Israel by mine hand, let there be dew on the fleece 
only ; but let it be dry on all the earth beside.” It fell out as he 
wished. With foot that leaves no trace or trail upon the grass, 
he goes next morning to examine the fleece, and there it lies, all 
glistening with the dews of night, to yield to his hands, as they 
wring it out, a bowlful of water. Peter only needed Christ to 
say, “ Come,” and without a thought or moment’s hesitation he 
sprang from the boat out on the sea. In Gideon’s circumstances 
he would have at once dropped the fleece to draw the sword and 
rush down on the hosts that lay in the valley of Israel like grass- 
hoppers for multitude. Not so Gideon. Perhaps by nature one 
of those who, like the granite that is ill to work but is long to 
wear, though tenacious of their purpose when it is formed are 
slow to form it, he is not yet satisfied. He has heard how much 
both Abraham and Moses, in their days, ventured to request of 
God. He also will venture, and ask another miracle. Here it 
is: “ Let not thine anger be hot against me,” he says; “I will 
speak but this once : let it now be dry only on the fleece, and on 
all the ground let there be dew.” Of the two this would be the 
most obvious miracle, wool being more ready than almost any- 
thing else to show signs of dew, as we have observed in beads 
standing thick on the tufts that furze or thorn had plucked from 
the passing flock when grass and ground seemed dry. The re- 
quest — not on Gideon’s part one of presumption, but of self-dis- 


198 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


trust — is granted; and now he can say with David and many 
else, “ Thy gentleness has made me great.” Next morning sees 
the whole earth “ sown i th Orient pearl ;” liquid diamonds top 
the spikes of grass and hang sparkling in the sunbeams on every 
bush, as Gideon, with feet bathed at each step in dew, draws near 
the fleece. He sees it, and has no more anxiety. No bead glistens 
on its surface, nor drop of water falls into the bowl, as, to make 
assurance doubly sure, he wrings the fleece in his hands. Now 
he is all faith. He has no further doubts. Recollecting the 
miracles of the fleece, he looks unmoved on the swarms of 
Midian ; unmoved, sees his army of more than thirty thousand 
men by coward flight diminished to one-third their number; un- 
moved, sees the ten thousand, like a snow-wreath on which winds 
have blown and the sun has beaten, reduced to three hundred 
men. At the head of so small a band, and with no other instru- 
ments of assault but a lamp and empty pitcher and trumpet, he 
stands confident and ready. The fleece is his battle banner. In 
the faith it has strengthened, if not created, he steals down in the 
darkness on the sleeping camp. On a sudden — to have them 
answered by three hundred more — he flashes his light and blows 
his trumpet, and with his battle-cry, “The sword of the Lord 
and of Gideon !” adds to the confusion and carnage of a scene 
where the Midianites, seized with a sudden panic, bury their 
swords in each other’s bosoms. 

He had a great work to do. But so has every Christian. 
With such temptations, perhaps, before us as have proved 
formidable, if not fatal, to the greatest saints — with trials to 
encounter that have wrung complaints from pious lips — with 
probably great fights of affliction to endure — with death and its 
gloomy terrors certainly to face — we shall need all the faith that 
pains and prayer can provide. The righteous scarcely are saved, 
many of them entering the harbor as a vessel that, with masts 
sprung and sails torn to ribbons and bulwarks gone by the board, 
bears marks of storm and danger and a sore battle for life. Paul 


GIDEON. 


199 


himself trembled lest he should be a castaway; and in view of 
our trials, we should labor, according to his advice, to make our 
calling and election sure, to have the witness of God’s Spirit 
with our own that we have been born again, and have certainly 
passed from death to life. By communion with God, let us seek 
to get our faith so strengthened that its trials may prove its most 
signal triumphs; and our spiritual vision growing clearer as our 
dying eye grows darker, a better world rising to view as this hides 
from the sight, glory opening over our heads as a grave opens 
beneath our feet, the voice of angels falling on our ear as it grows 
dull and duller to all earthly sounds, — they who bend over us to 
catch life’s last low whisper may hear us saying, “ My heart and 
my flesh faint and fail; but God is the strength of my heart, and 
my portion for evermore.” 

Gideon teaches us to make thorough work of what belongs to 
our deliverance from sin. 

In closing the account of what God did for him, and through 
him for his people, the historian says, “ Thus was Midian sub- 
dued before the children of Israel, so that they lifted up their 
heads no more.” And how was this accomplished? The re- 
markable victory God wrought for Gideon, without any effort on 
his part, may be regarded as a type of that greater, better vic- 
tory which, without any effort on ours, God’s Son wrought for us 
when he took our nature and our sins upon him, dying, the just 
for the unjust, that we might be saved. Gideon followed up this 
victory by calling all possible resources to his aid. He sum- 
moned the whole country to arms, as, accompanied by his famous 
three hundred men, he hung on the skirts of the broken host, 
and with sword bathed in their blood cut down the fugitives — 
kings, princes, captains and common soldiers — with an eye that 
knew no pity and a hand that did not spare. Now, it is to work 
as thorough that God calls all his followers. Extermination of our 
sins is the work that should engage our utmost efforts and inspire 
all our prayers. Jesus, and he alone, has won the victory and pur- 


200 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


chased our salvation ; but honored to be fellow-laborers with him 
and God, we are called to work it out. By resolute self-denial, 
by constant watchfulness, by earnest prayer, by the diligent use 
of every means of grace, and, above all, by the help of the Holy 
Spirit, we are to labor to cast sin out of our hearts — crucifying 
it — killing it — thrusting it through and through with the sword 
of the Spirit, which is the word of God, till its power is broken, 
and there is no more life in it, and it becomes hideous and hateful 
as a rotting corpse, and it can be said of the sins that were once 
our cruel masters and oppressors, They lift up their heads no more. 

This is no easy work. But heaven is not to be reached by 
easy-going people. Like a beleaguered city, where men scale the 
walls and swarm in at the deadly breach, the violent take it by 
force. The rest it offers is for the weary. The crowns it confers 
are for warriors’ brows. Its rewards are bestowed on such as, 
cutting off a right hand or plucking out a right eye to cast it 
away, deem it profitable that one of their members should perish, 
than that their whole body should be cast into hell-fire. Nor was 
Gideon’s easy work. His limbs were weary running, his hand 
was weary slaying, and the way was long and the sun high and 
hot, w T hen he arrived with his three hundred followers, panting 
and exhausted, at Jordan’s shore. To sit down ? No. It had 
been sweet to lie on its green banks, and, lulled to sleep by the 
song of birds and murmur of the stream, rest under its cool shades 
a while ; but bent on their purpose, they dashed right into the 
waters, and stemming the flood, passed over, “ he and the three 
hundred men, faint, yet pursuing.” “ Faint, yet pursuing,” be 
that our chosen motto. Till we are dead to sin and sin is dead 
to us, be it our daily work to crucify the flesh with its affections 
and lusts; and while asking that the God of hope would give us 
all joy and peace in believing, be the prayer we daily offer for 
ourselves that of St. Paul for his Thessalonian converts, “ The 
very God of peace sanctify you wholly.” 



XIII. 

JEPHTHAH. 

EPHTHAH is a wild, lawless freebooter. His irregu- 
lar birth in the half-civilized tribes beyond the Jordan 
is the keynote to his life. The whole scene is laid in 
those pastoral uplands. Not Bethel or Shiloh, but 
Mizpeh, the ancient watch-tower which witnessed the parting of 
Jacob and Laban, is the place of meeting, Ammon, one of 
the descendants of Lot, is now the assailant. The war springs 
out of the disputes of that first settlement. The battle sweeps 
over the whole tract of forest, from Gilead to the borders of 
Moab. The quarrel which arises after the battle between the 
Transjordanic tribe and the proud Western Ephrai mites is em- 
bittered by the recollection of taunts and quarrels, then, no doubt, 
full of gall and wormwood, now hardly intelligible. “ Fugitives 
of Ephraim are ye : Gilead is among the Ephraimites and among 
the Manassites.” Was it, as Ewald conjectures, some allusion to 
the lost history of the days when the half tribe Manasseh sepa- 
rated from its Western brethren? If it was, the Gileadites had 
now their turn — “ the fugitives of the Ephraimites,” as they are 
called in evident allusion to the former taunt, are caught in their 
flight at the fords of the Jordan — the scene of their victory over 
the Midianites — and ruthlessly slain. 

In the savage taunt of Jephthah to the Ephraimites, compared 
with the mild reply of Gideon to the same insolent tribe, we 

201 



202 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


have a measure of the inferiority uf Eastern to Western Pales- 
tine — of the degree to which Jephthah sank below his age and 
Gideon rose above it. But in his own country, as well as in the 
Church at large, it is the other part of Jephthah’s story which 
has been most keenly remembered. The fatal vow at the battle 
of Aroer belongs naturally to the spasmodic efforts of the age, 
like the vows of Samson or Saul in the Jewish Church of this 
period, or of Clovis or Bruno in the Middle Ages. But its 
literal execution could hardly have taken place had it been 
undertaken by any more under the moral restraints, even of that 
lawless age, than the freebooter Jephthah, nor in any other part 
of the Holy Land than that separated by the Jordan valley from 
the more regular institutions of the country. Moab and Ammon, 
the neighboring tribes to Jephthah’s native country, were the 
parts of Palestine where human sacrifice lingered longest. It 
was the first thought of Balak in the extremity of his terror 
(Mic. vi. 7) ; it was the last expedient of Balak’s successor in the 
war with Jehoshaphat. 2 Kings iii. 27. Moloch, to whom even 
before they entered Palestine the Israelites had offered human 
sacrifices (Ezek. xx. 26), and who is always spoken of as the 
deity who was thus honored, was especially the god of Ammon. 
It was but natural that a desperate soldier like Jephthah, breath- 
ing the same atmosphere, physical and social, should make the 
same vow, and having made it, adhere to it. There was nc 
high priest or prophet at hand to rebuke it. They were far 
away in the hostile tribe of Ephraim. He did what was right in 
his own eyes, and as such the transaction is described. Mostly 
it is but an inadequate account to give of these doubtful acts, to 
say that they are mentioned in the sacred narrative without com- 
mendation. Often where no commendation is expressly given 
it is distinctly implied. But here the story itself trembles with 
the mixed feeling of the action. The description of Jephthah’s 
wild character prepares us for some dark catastrophe. The ad- 
miration for his heroism and that of his daughter struggles for 


JEPIITIIAIL 


203 


mastery in the historian with indignation at the dreadful deed. 
He is overwhelmed by the natural grief of a father. “Oh, oh, 
my daughter! thou hast crushed me! thou hast crushed me!” 
She rises at once to the grandeur of her situation as the instru- 
ment whereby the victory had been won. If the fatal word had 
escaped his lips, she was content to die, “ forasmuch as the Lord 
hath taken vengeance of thee upon thine enemies, even the chil- 
dren of Ammon.” It is one of the points of sacred history, where 
the likeness of classical times mingles with the Hebrew devotion. 
It recalls to us the story of Idomeneus and his son, of Agamem- 
non and Iphigenia. And still more closely do we draw near, as 
our attention is fixed on the Jewish maiden, to a yet more pathetic 
scene. Her grief is the exact anticipation of the lament of Antig- 
one, sharpened by the peculiar horror of the Hebrew women at 
a childless death — descending with no bridal festivity, with no 
nuptial torches, to the dark chambers of the grave. Into the 
mountains of Gilead she retires for two months, plunging deeper 
and deeper into the gorges of the mountains, to bewail her lot, 
with the maidens who had come out with her to greet the return- 
ing conqueror. Then comes the awful end, from which the sacred 
writer, as it were, averts his eyes. “ He did with her according 
to his vow.” In her the house of Jephthah became extinct. But 
for years afterward, even to the verge of the monarchy, the dark 
deed was commemorated. Four days in every year the maidens 
of Israel went up into the mountains of Gilead — and here the 
Hebrew language lends itself to the ambiguous feeling of the 
narrative itself — “to praise” or “to lament” “the daughter of 
Jephthah the Gileadite.” 

The deep pathos of the original story, and the lesson which it 
reads of the heroism of the father and daughter, is to be admired 
and loved in the midst of the fierce superstitions across which it 
plays like a sunbeam on a stormy sea. So regarded, it may still 
be remembered with a sympathy at least as great as is given to 
the heathen immolations just cited, which awaken a sentiment of 


204 ' 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


compassion wherever they are known. The sacrifice of Jephthah’s 
daughter, taking it at its worst, was not a human sacrifice in the 
gross sense of the word — not a slaughter of an unwilling victim, 
as when the Gaul and Greek were buried alive in the Roman 
Forum, but the willing offering of a devoted heart, to free, as she 
supposed, her father and her country from a terrible obligation. 
It was, indeed, as Josephus says, an act in itself hateful to God. 
But, nevertheless, it contained just that one redeeming feature of 
pure obedience and love which is the distinguishing mark of all 
true sacrifice, and which communicates to the whole story those 
elements of tenderness and nobleness well drawn out of it by two 
modern poets, to each of whom, in their different ways, may be 
applied what was said by Goethe of the first — that at least one 
function committed to him was that of giving life and form to 
the incidents and characters of the Old Testament : 

“Though the virgins of Salem lament, 

Be the judge and the hero unbent ; 

I have won the great battle for thee, 

And my father and country are free. 

“When this blood of thy giving has gush’d, 

When the voice that thou lovest is hush’d, 

Let my memory still be thy pride, 

And forget not I smiled as I died.” 

Byron's Hebrew Melodies. 

Or, in the still more exact language of the more recent poet, 
Tennyson : 

“The daughter of the warrior Gileadite, 

A maiden pure; as when she went along 
From Mizpeli’s tower’d gate with radiance light, 

With timbrel and with song. 
****** 

“ 1 My God, my land, my father — these did move 
Me from my bliss of life that Nature gave, 

Lower’d softly with a threefold cord of love, 

Down to a silent grave. 


JEPHTHAH. 


205 


“ 1 And I went mourning, “ No fair Hebrew boy 
Shall smile away my maiden blame among 
The Hebrew mothers”— emptied of all joy, 

Leaving the dance and song. 

“ ‘ Leaving the olive-gardens far below, 

Leaving the promise of my bridal bower, 

The valleys of grape-loaded vines that glow 
Beneath the battled tower. 
****** 

“‘When the next moon was roll’d into the sky, 

Strength came to me that equal’d my desire. 

How beautiful a thing it was to die 
For God and for my sire! 

“‘It comforts me in this one thought to dwell, 

That I subdued me to my father’s will; 

Because the kiss he gave me, ere I fell, 

Sweetens the spirit still. 
****** 

“‘Moreover it is written that my race 

Hew’d Ammon, hip and thigh, from Aroer 
On Arnon unto Minnithl’” 

Upon the gloom of this painful history an ethereal brightness 
shines. What can be more beautiful, more wonderful, than this 
pure and lovely maid, brought up among bandits and far from 
the tabernacle of God, thus freely and sweetly giving up herself 
as a thank-offering for the victories of Israel? And who can 
fail to see, in this story of the meek and self-sacrificing maid, a 
marvelous and mysterious adumbration of a better sacrifice of 
another soul, of an only child, perfectly free and voluntary, and 
of virgin holiness and heavenly purity — the sacrifice of Christ, 
who gave his spotless soul to death for our sakes? Like him, 
she offers herself a willing sacrifice, and in the full foresight of 
death she comes down from her mountain liberty at the appointed 
time to offer up her virgin soul. Her life is given, the price, as 
it were, of Israel's victory over the enemy. Her suffering was 
not for her own sin, but through the error of another. Jephthah’s 


206 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


daughter gave her body willingly as a sacrifice, yet she wept with 
her companions ; Christ our Lord gave his soul willingly an offer- 
ing for sin, yet he wept tears of blood. 

As to the act of Jephthah, the brevity and obscurity of the 
record are full of significance. Let those who are most forward 
to condemn look well to themselves. The subject is painful ; 
but are there no immolations of children in our day and within 
the borders of our churches ? On this point, one of the greatest 
living teachers of the Church expresses himself in words that are 
full of solemn interest. 

“Is there not an immolation of children,” says Bishop Words- 
worth, “worse than Jephthah’s sacrifice of his daughter? She 
was a conscious and willing victim, offering herself to be sacri- 
ficed for the performance of her father’s vow, because he had 
conquered the enemies of Israel. Her body was sacrificed, but 
her spirit was untouched. But there are moral immolations of 
children by their parents — immolations of their immortal souls 
to Mammon, to the god of money-getting — immolations to Belial, 
the spirit of license and lust; and there are spiritual immolations 
of unconscious victims — immolations of young maidens in the 
flower of life and beauty to the solitude and seclusion of a clois- 
ter, into which they are beguiled with soft speeches, when they 
kneel before Christian altars crowmed as victims, attired in pure 
white robes, as if they were brides of Christ. Therefore let 
Christian churches meditate on the history of Jephthah, and let 
them apply it to themselves. Will it not be more tolerable for 
Jephthah in the day of judgment than for those who offer such 
human sacrifices as these — sacrifices, it may be, not only of body, 
but of soul ?” 



XIV. 

SAMSON. 

ROM the lawlessness of Jephthah on the extreme eastern 
frontier of Palestine, we pass at once to a manifestation 
of the same tendency in a different, but not less incon- 
testable, form on the extreme western frontier. At the 
same time the new enemies, in whose grasp we now find the Is- 
raelites, remind us that we are approaching a new epoch in their 
history. 

“ The Philistines” now present themselves to our notice, if not 
absolutely for the first time, yet for the first time as a powerful 
and hostile nation. In the original conquest by Joshua they are 
hardly mentioned. Their name appears to indicate their late 
arrival — “ the strangers and the scattered indications of their 
origin lead to the conclusion that they were settlers from some 
foreign country. Unlike the rest of the inhabitants of Canaan, 
they were uncircumcised, and appear to have stood on a lower 
level of civilization. They were almost, it may be said, the 
laughing-stock of their livelier and quicker neighbors, from their 
dull, heavy stupidity; the easy prey of the rough humor of Sam- 
son, or of the agility and cunning of the diminutive David. 

Possibly the Philistines may have been called in by the older 
Avites as allies against the invading Israelites, and then, as in 
the ancient fable, made themselves their masters. Be that as it 
may, the Philistines were the longest and deadliest enemies of 

the chosen people, whose hostilities, commencing in the close 

20 r 



208 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


of the period of the Judges, lasted througli the first two reigns 
of the monarchy, and were not finally extinguished till the time 
of Hezekiah. 

Of all the tribes of Israel, that on which these new-comers 
pressed most heavily was the small tribe of Dan, already strait- 
ened between the mountains and the sea, and communicating 
with its seaport, Joppa, only by passing through the Philistine 
territory. Out of this tribe, accordingly, the deliverer came. It 
was in Zorah, planted on a high conical hill overlooking the 
plain, which, from its peculiar relation to these hills, was called 
“the root of Dan,” that the birth of the child took place, who 
was by a double tie connected with the history of this peculiar 
period as the first conqueror of the Philistines and as the first 
recorded instance of a Nazarite. In both respects he was the 
beginner of that work which a far greater than he — the prophet 
Samuel — carried to a completion. But what in Samuel were but 
subordinate functions, in Samson were supreme, and in him were 
further united with an eccentricity of character and career that 
gave him his singular position amongst the Israelite heroes. 

This was the age of vows, and it is implied in the account that 
such special vows as that which marked the life of Samson were 
common. The order of Nazarites, which we find described in 
the code of the Mosaic law, was already in existence. It was the 
nearest approach to a monastic institution that the Jewish Church 
contained. It was, as its name implies, a separation from the rest 
of the nation, partly by the abstinence from all intoxicating drink, 
partly by the retention of the savage covering of long flowing 
tresses of hair. The order thus begun continued till the latest 
times. It was as the first fruits of this institution, no less than 
as his country’s champion, that the birth of Samson is ushered in 
with a solemnity of inauguration which, whether we adopt the 
more coarse and literal representation of Josephus, or the more 
shadowy and refined representation of the sacred narrative, seems 
to announce the coming of a greater event than that which is 


SAMSON. 


209 


comprised in the merely warlike career of the conqueror of the 
Philistines. 

Whenever the son of Manoah appeared in later life, he was 
always known by the Nazarite mark. The early vow of his 
mother was always testified by his shaggy, untonsured head, and 
bv the seven sweeping locks, twisted together yet distinct, which 
hung over his shoulders; and in all his wild wanderings and ex- 
cesses amidst the vineyards of Sorek and Timnath, he is never 
reported to have touched the juice of one of their abundant 
grapes. 

But these were his only indications of an austere life. It is 
one of the many distinctions between the manners of the East 
and West, between ancient and modern forms of religious feeling, 
that the Jewish chief, whose position most nearly resembles that 
of the founder of a monastic order, should be the most frolicsome, 
irregular, uncultivated creature that the nation ever produced. 
Not only was celibacy no part of his Nazarite obligations, but 
not even ordinary purity of life. He was full of the spirits and 
the pranks, no less than of the strength, of a giant. His name, 
which Josephus interprets in the sense of “ strong,” was still more 
characteristic. He was the “ sunny ” — the bright and beaming, 
though wayward, likeness of the great luminary which the He- 
brews delighted to compare to a “ giant rejoicing to run his 
course,” “a bridegroom coming forth out of his chamber.” 
Nothing can disturb his radiant good humor. His most valiant, 
his most cruel, actions are done with a smile on his face and a 
jest in his mouth. It relieves his character from the sternness 
of Phoenician fanaticism. As a peal of hearty laughter breaks in 
upon the despondency of individual sorrow, so the joviality of 
Samson becomes a pledge of the revival of the greatness of his 
nation. It is brought out in the strongest contrast with the 
brute coarseness and stupidity of his Philistine enemies, here, as 
throughout the sacred history, the butt of Israelitish wit and 

Israel itish craft. 

14 


210 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


Look at his successive acts in this light, and they assume a 
fresh significance. Out of his first achievement he draws the 
materials for his playful riddle. His second and third achieve- 
ments are practical jests on the largest scale. The mischievous- 
ness of the conflagration of the cornfields by means of the jackals 
is subordinate to the ludicrous aspect of the adventure, as, from 
the hill of Zorah, the contriver of the scheme watched the streams 
of fire spreading through cornfields and orchards in the plain 
below. The whole point of the massacre of the thousand Philis- 
tines lies in the cleverness with which their clumsy triumph is 
suddenly turned into discomfiture, and their discomfiture is cele- 
brated by the punning turn of the hero, not forgotten even in the 
exaltation or the weariness of victory: “ With the jawbone of an 
ass have I slain one mass , two masses ; with the jawbone of an 
ass I have slain an oadoad of men.” The carrying off the gates 
of Gaza derives all its force from the neatness with which the 
Philistine watchmen are outdone on the very spot where they 
thought themselves secure. The answers with which he puts off 
the inquisitiveness of Delilah derive their vivacity from the 
quaintness of the devices which he suggests and the ease with 
which his foolish enemies fall into trap after trap, as if only 
to give their conqueror amusement. The closing scenes of his 
life breathe throughout the same terrible, yet grotesque, irony. 
When the captive warrior is called forth, in the merriment of his 
persecutors, to exercise for the last time the well-known raillery 
of his character, he appears as the great jester or buffoon of the 
nation ; the word employed expresses alike the roars of laughter 
and the wild gambols by which he “made them sport;” and as 
he puts forth the last energy of his vengeance, the final effort of 
his expiring strength, it is in a stroke of broad and savage humor 
that his indignant spirit passes away. “O Lord Jehovah, re- 
member me now; and strengthen me now, only this once, O God, 
that I may be avenged of the Philistines” [not for both of my 
lost eyes, but] “for one of my two eyes.” That grim playfulness, 


SAMSON. 


211 


strong in death, lends its paradox even to the act of destruction 
itself, and overflows into the touch of triumphant satire, with 
which the pleased historian closes his story: “ The dead which 
he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in 
his life.” 

There is no portion of the sacred narrative more stamped with 
a peculiar local color than the account of Samson. Unlike the 
heroes of Grecian, Celtic or Teutonic romance whose deeds are 
scattered over the whole country or the whole continent where 
they lived — Hercules or Arthur or Charlemagne — the deeds of 
Samson are confined to that little corner of Palestine in which 
was pent up the fragment of the tribe to which he belonged. He 
is the one champion of Dan. To him, if to any one, must be the 
reference in the blessing of Jacob: “Dan shall judge his people 
as one of the tribes of Israel.” In his biting wit and cunning 
ambuscades, which baffled the horses and chariots of Philistia, 
may probably be seen “ the serpent by the way, the adder in the 
path, that biteth the horse’s heels, so that his rider shall fall 
backward.” 

The scene of his death is the great temple of the fish-god at 
Gaza, in the extremity of the Philistine district. But his grave 
was in the same spot which had nourished his first youthful hopes. 
Prom the time of Gideon downward the tombs of the judges have 
been carefully specified. In no case, however, does the specifica- 
tion suggest a more pathetic image than in the description of the 
funeral procession, in which the dead hero is borne by his brothers 
and his kinsmen “up” the steep ascent to his native hills, and 
laid, as it would seem, beside the father who had watched with 
pride his early deeds, “ between Zorah and Eshtaol, in the burial- 
place of Manoah his father.” 

“When all abroad was rumor’d that this day 
Samson should be brought forth to show the people 
Proof of his mighty strength in feats and games, 

I sorrow’d at his captive state, but minded 


212 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


Not to be absent at that spectacle. 

The building was a spacious theatre, 

Half round, on two main pillars vaulted high, 

With seats, where all the lords, and each degree 
Of sort, might sit in order to behold ; 

The other side was open, where the throng 
On banks and scaffolds under sky might stand: 

I among these aloof obscurely stood. 

The feast and noon grew high, and sacrifice 

Had fill’d their hearts with mirth, high cheer and wine, 

When to their sports they turn’d. Immediately 

Was Samson as a public servant brought, 

In their state livery clad; before him pipes 
And timbrels, on each side went armed guards, 

Both horse and foot, before him and behind 
Archers and slingers, cataphracts and spears. 

At sight of him, the people with a shout 
Rifted the air, clamoring their god with praise, 

Who had made their dreadful enemy their thrall. 

He, patient, but undaunted, where they led him, 

Came to the place ; and what was set before him, 

Which without help of eye might be assay’d, 

To heave, pull, draw or break, he still perform’d 
All with incredible, stupendous force, 

None daring to appear antagonist. 

At length for intermission’ sake they led him 
Between the pillars; he his guide requested 
(For so from such as nearer stood we heard) 

As over-tired to let him lean a while 

With both his arms on those two massy pillars, 

That to the arched roof gave main support. 

He, unsuspicious, led him ; which when Samson 
Felt in his arms, with head a while inclined 
And eyes fast fix’d he stood, as one who pray’d 
Or some great matter in his mind revolved.; 

At last with head erect thus cried aloud: 

Hitherto, lords, what your commands imposed 
I have perform’d, as reason was, obeying, 

Not without wonder or delight beheld: 

Now of my own accord such other trial 
I mean to show you of my strength, yet greater, 


SAMSON. 


213 


As with amaze shall strike all who behold. 

This utter’d, straining $11 his nerves he bow’d : 

As with the force of winds and waters pent, 

When mountains tremble, these two massy pillars 
With horrible convulsion to and fro 
He tugg’d, he shook, till down they came, and drew 
The whole roof after them, with burst of thunder, 
Upon the heads of all who sat beneath, 

Lords, ladies, captains, counselors or priests, 

Their choice nobility and flower, not only 
Of this, but each Philistian city round, 

Met from all parts to solemnize this feast. 

Samson, with these inmixed, inevitably 
Pull’d down the same destruction on himself ; 

Oh dearly-bought revenge, yet glorious ! 

Samson hath quit himself like Samson, 

And heroicly hath finished a life heroic. 

On his enemies revenged, victorious 
He lies among his slain, self-kill’d, 

Join’d in his death with foes more numerous 
Than all his life had slain before.” 



XV. 

BOAZ. 

ARMING, rather than gardening in the ordinary sense 
of the word, is man’s oldest occupation ; in point of 
time, at least, claiming priority of all others. Insti- 
tuted by divine authority, and pursued by man in his 
primeval innocence — with the ordinances of marriage and the 
Sabbath day — it is a vestige of Eden. The business of a farmer, 
as regards both its age and origin, is invested with a dignity that 
belongs to no other profession. 

“The sacred plough 

Employ’d the kings and fathers of mankind 
In ancient times.” 

Besides, it is probable, if not certain, that it is the one employ- 
ment in which man had God for his teacher. The heathens 
themselves represent the gods as having taught him how to cul- 
tivate corn ; and in this, as in many of their other legends, they 
have preserved a valuable fragment of ancient truth. While 
some trades are of very recent origin — photography, for example 
— and while many have advanced to their present stage of per- 
fection by slow steps — as spinning, from the simple distaff, still 
often used in Brittany and sometimes in remote parts of Scot- 
land, to the complicated machines that whirl amid the dust and 
din of crowded factories — it is a remarkable fact that the cereal 
grasses — wheat, barley, and other grains which the farmer now 
cultivates — were cultivated four thousand years ago. Forming 

214 



BOAZ. 


215 


new fabrics; discovering new metals; learning how, as in ships, 
to make iron swim — the sun^ as in photographs, to paint portraits 
— the lightning, as in telegraphs, to carry messages — and fire and 
water, as in locomotives, to whirl us along the ground with the 
speed of an eagle’s wing — man has, to use the words of Scripture, 
even in our own time, “ found out many inventions.” Yet he 
has not added one to the number of our cereals during the last 
four thousand years. He appears, in fact, to have started on his 
career with a knowledge of these — a knowledge he could have 
obtained from none but God. He it was who taught him the 
arts of agriculture — what plants to cultivate, and how to culti- 
vate them. There is that, indeed, in the nature of wheat, barley 
and the other cereals which goes almost to demonstrate that God 
specially created them for man’s use and originally committed 
them to his care. These plants are unique in two respects — first, 
unlike others the fruits or roots of which we use for food, they 
are found wild nowhere on the face of the whole earth ; and 
secondly, unlike others also, they cannot prolong their existence 
independent of man, without his care and culture. 

For example, let a field which has been sown with wheat, 
barley or oats be abandoned to the course of nature, and wha* 
happens? The following year a scanty crop, springing^ from thd 
grain it had shed, may rise in thin stalks on the uncultivated 
soil, but in a few summers more every vestige of it has van- 
ished, u nor left a wrack behind.” 

A more than curious, this is an important, fact. It proves 
that those grains which form his main subsistence cannot main- 
tain themselves without the hand and help of man ; and proving 
that, it proves this also, that man started on his career a tiller of 
the ground — no such being as infidels, in their hatred of the 
Bible, represent him to have been, a naked savage, ignorant 
alike of arts and letters, little raised in intelligence above the 
wild animals in whose dens he sought a home and of whose prey 
he sought a share. This fact in natural history corroborates the 


216 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


testimony of Scripture, and shows us, in fields 'where every stalk 
stands up a living witness for the truth of the Bible, the revela- 
tions of God’s word visibly written on the face of Nature. 
Waving with golden corn and sounding with the songs of 
reapers, these fields carry the thoughtful mind back to the days 
when God first set man to till the ground, and, suggestive of 
Eden, they prompt the wish that, with its primeval employ- 
ments, more of its primeval innocence were found among our 
rural population. 

The scene before me, as I write these words, suggests another 
view of the occupation in which Boaz spent his days. Beyond 
the estuary of the Dee, over whose broad sands, celebrated in 
tragic song, the tide, flecked with the sails of shipping craft and 
fishing-boats, has rolled, lies, a few miles off, the winding shore 
of Wales, the land rising gently from the beach in corn and pas- 
ture fields to heights over which a picturesque range of moun- 
tains heaves itself up against the evening sky. Along that low 
shore lie scattered towns and villages, whose tall chimneys, 
dwarfing tower and steeple, pour out their smoke to pollute the 
air, and cast a murky veil on the smiling face of Nature. These 
bespeak the trades they pursue who, leaving the husbandman to 
his cheerful labors on the green surface of the earth, penetrate its 
bowels to rob them of their hidden treasures — the mine of its 
coals and the mountains of their metals. But these, valuable as 
they are, many hands as they employ, and much as they contri- 
bute to the influence and wealth of the country, are undergoing 
a process of exhaustion. Some think their limit will be soon 
reached, and are already bewailing the prospect when, with tires 
quenched in ruined furnaces, and spindles rusting in silent mills, 
and ships rotting in unfrequented harbors, Britain shall bid a 
long farewell to all her greatness. But when mines are empty, 
and furnaces stand quenched and cold, and deep silence reigns 
in the caverns where the pick of the pitman sounded, the hus- 
bandman shall still plough the soil. Ilis, the first man’s, shall 


BOAZ. 


217 


probably be the last man’s, employment. Continued throughout 
those millennial years when, with swords turned into ploughshares 
and spears into pruning-hooks, “ the whole earth is at rest and 
is quiet,” the archangel’s trumpet shall scare the peasant at the 
plough or summon him from the harvest-field. Fit emblem of 
the blessings of saving grace, the bounties of the soil are exhaust- 
less. Husbandry will thus prove, as it is the oldest, the most 
permanent, of all employments ; and since it produces the nation’s 
food, and is, according to many, the true source of its wealth, there 
is none with which the public welfare is so extensively and inti- 
mately bound up. 

The occupation which Boaz followed rises still higher in im- 
portance when we look at the multitudes it employs. Great as 
we are in commerce and manufactures — clothing nations with our 
fabrics, covering every sea with ships, and carrying the produce 
of our arts to every shore — the cultivation of the soil employs a 
larger number of hands than any other trade. And thus, if" the 
greatest happiness of the greatest number ” be a sound and noble 
adage, the temporal, moral and spiritual interests of our agricul- 
tural population should bulk very large in the eyes of Christian 
patriots. Now, these interests turn to a great extent on the man- 
ner in which those who follow Boaz’s occupation discharge their 
duties; and it is therefore a matter of thankfulness that in him 
the Book which instructs both kings and beggars, peers and 
peasants, how to live, sets before us a model farmer. Happy our 
country were all its farmers like him, and all their servants like 
his J — making rural innocence a reality, not merely a poet’s dream 
or the graceful ornament of a speech. Let us study this pattern. 

HIS DILIGENCE IN BUSINESS. 

Boaz was not one whom necessity compelled to labor. He 
was rich, and is indeed called “a mighty man of wealth.” Yet 
he made that no reason for wasting his life in ease and idleness. 
Nor though, as appears from the Scripture narrative, he employed 


218 


GREAT MEN CF GOD. 


overseers — men, no doubt, of character and integrity — did he 
consider it right to commit his business entirely into their hands. 
Here is a lesson for us. 

In the first place, such irresponsibility is not good for servants. 
It places them in circumstances of temptation to act dishonestly : 
and yielding to temptations to which no man is justified in un- 
necessarily exposing others, many a good servant has had his 
ruin to lay at the door of a too easy and confiding master. 
Neither is it, in the second place, for the master’s interests. The 
eye of the master maketh a fat horse y savs an English proverb. 
The farmer ploughs best with his feet , says a Scotch one, his suc- 
cess turning on the attention he personally gives to the super- 
intendence of his servants and the different interests of his farm. 
Boaz in the field among his reapers, or at the winnowing season 
foregoing the luxury of a bed to sleep at the back of a heap of 
corn, that, losing no time in traveling between his house and the 
distant threshing-floor, he might resume his work by the break 
of day, is an example of these old, wise adages; and how, pattern 
to others as well as farmers, a Christian should be — as the apostle 
says, and Jesus was — “ not slothful in business,” while “ fervent 
in spirit, serving the Lord.” Religion, sanctifying the seculari- 
ses of life, does not teach us to neglect our business, but, on the 
contrary, to attend to it, making it as much our duty to repair 
to our farm or shop or counting-house, during the week, as, turn- 
ing our back on them and dismissing their cares from our minds, 
we repair to church on the Lord’s day. 

The hand of the diligent, says the wise man, maketh rich. It 
does more: Boaz’s industry probably contributed as much to his 
moral safety as to his material wealth. Neither in the inspired 
Bible nor elsewhere is there a more important practical truth 
than that expressed by the epigrammatic saying, The devil tempts 
every man , but an idle man tempts the devil ; and thus it is best for 
men themselves — and for others also — when their circumstances 
impose on them a life of constant industry. Those engaged in 


BOAZ. 


219 


Boaz’s pursuits form no exception to that adage, as was remark- 
ably illustrated by the state of a country parish with which I was 
once acquainted. Many of its farms were held on life-leases and 
at very low rents, but the rest were let at prices which required 
their tenants to be industrious and economical. And so inferior 
in point of culture was the first class to the second that a stranger 
could have told which was which. Nor were the advantages of 
a condition which neither permits nor fosters idleness less visible 
in the character of the farmers than in the condition of the farms. 
With exceptions, of course, on both sides, those who could not 
meet term-day without being diligent in business were respectable 
in character, men of sober habits, wealthy and well to do ; while 
not a few of the others became bankrupts, some living as much 
bankrupt in character as they died insolvent in circumstances. 
The bird that ceases to use its wings does not hang in mid-air, 
but drops like a stone to the ground ; and by a law almost as 
certain, he sinks into evil habits whose time and faculties are not 
engaged on innocent and good employments. So much is this 
the case that, though periods of relaxation are desirable, there is 
danger in unduly prolonging them. “ There are few, indeed,” 
says Addison in the Spectator , “ who know how to be idle and 
innocent : every diversion they take is at the expense of some one 
virtue or another, and their very first step out of business is into 
vice or folly.” The purest water left to stagnate grows putrid, 
and the finest soil thrown into fallow soon throws up a crop of 
weeds. Had David, as in other days, followed his army to the 
battle-field, he had periled his life, but saved his character, 
escaping a temptation that owed perhaps more than half its power 
to the luxurious ease and idleness of a palace. Idleness is the 
mother of mischief, and who would keep their hands from doing 
wrong must employ them in doing good. 

But this can only be done to the advantage of others as well as 
of ourselves by imitating the diligence of Boaz. “ Slothful in 
business,” he had not been in circumstances to be generous as 


220 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


well as just. I have had much to do with begging of a kind, 
and have often observed that those were most distinguished for 
their munificence in charities who were most distinguished for 
their diligence in business. It gives the ability to bless others; 
and in that a good man will find ample reasons for managing his 
affairs with diligence and discretion, making it a matter not of 
choice, but of conscience. If we do not need money, others do. 
Many good and noble causes, like Ruth, require assistance ; nor 
can any but those who are careful of their affairs afford to deal 
with them as Boaz with the widow, whom he generously invited 
to the bounties of his table — besides, with such a delicate regard 
to her feelings as reflected the highest credit on his own, whisper- 
ing to his servants, “ Let her glean among the sheaves, and let 
fall some handfuls on purpose for her.” 

Here is a pattern to copy, and a noble incentive to diligence in 
business — one which, though we may take a long step from the 
case of this honorable man to that of a thief, Paul employed, 
saying, “Let him who stole steal no more; but rather let him 
labor, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he 
may have to give to him that needeth.” For this end, men who 
could afford to retire from business have continued in it. Instead 
of seeking rest in the evening of life, they have labored on to its 
close; they have denied themselves for Him who denied himself 
for them ; and that they might have to give to such as lacked, 
toiled on till the oar dropped from their weary hands. Far more 
than the life of the hermit who retires to cloister or mossy cell 
that he may pass the long day in solitude and alone with God, 
or that of one who occupies his whole time with religious specu- 
lations or the ordinary duties of devotion, is his a religious life 
who for such an object holds his post to the last, continuing dili- 
gent in business that he may have wherewithal to glorify God, 
assist the cause of the Redeemer and bless humanity — that he 
may be a husband of the widow and a father of the fatherless — 
that he may reclaim the lapsed and raise the fallen, and whether 


BOAZ. 


221 


they be the godless at home or the heathen abroad, save such 
as are ready to perish. 

HIS COURTEOUSNESS. 

“Be courteous” is a duty which Peter enjoins, and of which 
Doth he and Paul were bright examples. He who began his de- 
fence before Agrippa in this graceful fashion : “ I think myself 
happy, King Agrippa, because I shall answer for myself this day 
before thee touching all the things whereof I am accused of the 
Jews ; especially because I know thee to be expert in all customs 
and questions which are among the Jews : wherefore I beseech 
thee to hear me patiently” — was no rude, coarse, vulgar man. 
His was courtesy to a superior; but a still finer ornament of 
manners, and of religion also, is courtesy to inferiors. And what 
a fine example of that is Boaz ! It is with no cold looks, nor 
distant air, nor rough speech, nor haughty bearing, making his 
reapers painfully sensible of their inferiority — that they are ser- 
vants and he their master — Boaz enters the harvest-field. “ The 
master !” spoken by one who has espied him approaching — words 
that strike with dread the noisy urchins of a school — neither turns 
their mirth into silence nor makes them start to reluctant labors. 
Benevolence beams forth in his looks; and as the children who 
have attended their mothers to the field, won of old by his gifts 
and ready smile, run to meet him, he approaches with kindness 
on his lips. These are not sealed in cold silence, or opened but 
to find fault with his servants and address them roughly. “The 
Lord be with you !” is his salutation. They, dropping work, face 
round, sickles in hand, health in their ruddy cheeks and the sweat 
of honest labor on their brows, to welcome their master, and, his 
inferiors in rank, but his equals in pious courtesy, to reply, “ The 
Lord bless thee !” More beautiful than the morning, with its 
dews sparkling like diamonds on the grass, and its golden beams 
tipping the surrounding hills of Bethlehem, these morning saluta- 
tions between master and servants ! Loving him, they esteemed 


222 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


his interests their own. Would that employers and employes 
everywhere would take Boaz and his workmen as a pattern ! 

These beautiful expressions, as might be inferred from the 
words of the one hundred and twenty-ninth Psalm — “ Let them 
be as the grass upon the house-tops, which withereth afore it 
groweth up ; wherewith the mower filleth not his hand, nor he 
that bindeth sheaves his bosom ; neither do they which go by 
say, The blessing of the Lord be upon you : we bless you in the 
name of the Lord” — may possibly have grown into a custom. Be 
it so. It was a very good custom. It had its root in the kindly 
relations that subsisted in these happy days between masters and 
servants, and the lack of which in ours breeds the jealousies that 
ever and anon break out in the unhappy strikes that entail such 
pecuniary losses on the employers, and such bitter sufferings on 
the families of the employed. Whatever may have been the case 
with others, Boaz’s courtesy was more than a form of speech — 
that French politeness, so often like the French polish which im- 
parts to mean timber the lustre of fine-grained woods. His con- 
duct corresponded with his speech. Observe the eye of com- 
passion he cast on Buth ; his kindness to the lonely stranger ; 
the delicacy with which he sought to save her feelings while he 
relieved her poverty; the respect he showed to her misfortunes 
and her generous attachment to Naomi. He paid as much honor 
to the virtues and feelings of this poor gleaner as if she had 
been the finest lady in the land. Behold true courteousness ! 

This grace is a great set-off to piety. As such it should be 
assiduously cultivated by all who desire to “ adorn the doctrine 
of God our Saviour,” religion, associated with a kind and court- 
eous manner, being, to use Solomon’s figure, like “ apples of gold 
in pictures of silver.” 

Nor is there any reason, as the case of Boaz proves, why 
courteousness should be foreign to a country life, or rural scenes 
should breed rude manners. No doubt those who reside in 
towns, being brought in frequent contact with others, acquire a 


BOAZ. 


223 


polish more readily than country people, even as the stones on 
the sea-beach become rounded and smooth by the tides that roll 
them against each other. Allowance is to be made for this and 
other disadvantages which belong to country life. For candor 
requires us, in judging others, to take into account the drawbacks 
of their position — that every profession has its own peculiar 
temptations, and that censorious people will find it easier to con- 
demn the faults of others than they would, were they in their 
circumstances, to avoid them. The cultivator, like the lord of 
the soil, seldom meets his superiors, and even his equals much 
less frequently than the citizen who, on crowded ’change and 
busy streets, comes in daily contact with many of talents, acquire- 
ments and position as good as his own. Walking his farm as a 
little kingdom, as the captain of a man-of-war his quarter-deck, 
and surrounded only by servants and inferiors, the circumstances 
of a farmer are not the most conducive to the acquisition of very 
courteous manners. Yet what he, as well as all other masters, 
may and should be, is seen in Boaz. A farmer, he was in the 
old, true sense of the word every inch a gentleman : pious, yet 
of polished manners; wealthy, yet gracious to the poor, and 
esteeming virtue above rank or riches; with dependents, yet 
treating the humblest of them with respectful courtesy ; one in 
whom were beautifully blended the politeness of a court and the 
simple virtues of a country life. 

A good practical lesson may be learned from the way in which 
this man bore himself toward his inferiors. It is by no means 
uncommon to hear servants, the peasantry and the common 
people blamed for their rude and vulgar manners. But they 
who censure what I do not altogether deny, far less commend, 
would do well to remember that there were more servants court- 
eous as those of Boaz, were there more masters like him. Why 
are the lower classes not respectful to the superior ? May it not 
be, and is it not true to a large extent, that the latter are not 
respectful to them ? Like begets like y they say ; and of that, so 


224 


GREAT ME At OF GOD. 


far as courteousness is concerned, France and other countries 
of Europe furnish remarkable illustrations. One of their pleas- 
ant features is the respectful manner which the upper classes show 
to the humbler, with which a master addresses his own servant 
The result is that the lower catch the manners of the upper 
classes, and are not rude, because they are not rudely treated. 
Men are like mirrors — they reflect the features of those that look 
at them. 

We sometimes plume ourselves on our superiority to our 
neighbors in morals and religion. But why should not religion, 
in begetting kind and courteous manners, do as much, and more, 
for ns than nature or fashion does for them ? What rude and 
unmannerly language is at times addressed to servants ! How 
little do many scruple to wound the feelings of their inferiors ! — 
a vulgar and cowardly as well as an unchristian thing. They 
cannot return the blow ; and it is like striking a man when he is 
down. Courteousness lies in a due regard to the feelings of 
others, and is a Christian duty. Paul enforced it by his precepts 
and illustrated it bv his example. The whole tone and tenor of 
the Bible teaches us to be gentle ; to be courteous as well as kind ; 
to esteem men of low degree : to be kindly affectioned one toward 
another ; and so to bear ourselves to our inferiors as to make them 
forget, rather than remember, their inferiority. The followers of 
Jesus are to be humble, not haughty — “ clothed with humility,” 
says the apostle — a robe, next to the righteousness which, cover- 
ing all our sins, was woven on Calvary and dyed white in the 
blood of Christ, the fairest man can wear. 

HIS PIETY. 

ft The Lord be with you !” — his address to the reapers on enter- 
ing the harvest-field — has the ring of sterling metal. What a 
contrast Boaz offers to farmers we have known, by whose lips 
God’s name was frequently profaned but never honored, their 
servants, like their dogs and horses, being often cursed, but never 


BOAZ. 


225 


once blessed! And in accordance with the apophthegm, Like 
master like man , what shocking oaths have we heard, volleying as 
it were out of the mouth of hell, from the lips of coarse, animal, 
sensual farm-servants ! 

Boaz almost never opens his mouth but pearls drop out. His 
speech breathes forth pious utterances. All his conversation is 
seasoned with grace ; and though the result of a divine change 
of heart, how natural his religion seems! — not like a gala-dress 
assumed for the occasion — not like gum-flowers worn for orna- 
ment, but such as spring living from the sward — not like an 
artificial perfume that imparts a passing odor to a thing that is 
dead, but the odors exhaled by roses or lilies bathed in the dews 
of heaven. One who could say, “ I have set the Lord always be- 
fore me.” God is ill all the good man’s thoughts, and his holy 
name as often in his mouth to be honored as it is in others to be 
profaned. Though it may have been a common custom to bless 
the harvest and its reapers, he did it from his heart; nor were 
they words of course or custom he spoke when, bending on Ruth 
an eye of mingled pity and admiration, he said, “ It hath fully 
been showed me all that thou hast done unto thy mother-in-law 
since the death of thine husband : and how thou hast left thy 
father, and thy mother, and the land of thy nativity, and art 
come unto a people which thou knewest not heretofore. The 
Lord remember thy work; and a full reward be given thee of 
the Lord God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to 
trust.” 

Nor was it only in the language of piety that his piety ex- 
pressed itself. It did not evaporate in words. We have heard 
him speak — see how he acts! One night sleeping by a heap of 
corn, alone, as he supposed, he wakes to find a woman lying at 
his feet. Starting up amazed, he cries, “Who art thou?” — a 
question which, no doubt expecting, she answers, saying, “ I am 
Ruth ;” adding, “ Spread therefore thy skirt over thine hand- 
maid, for thou art a near kinsman.” Evil to him that evil thinks. 

15 


226 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


In this speech no immodesty stains the lips of Ruth, or casts tl*? 
breath of suspicion on her character. Every country has customs 
and modes of expression peculiar to itself; and this which she 
employed was that followed by the Jewish women, when, in cir- 
cumstances akin to hers, they claimed marriage of their nearest 
kinsman — the rights, in fact, of the living and the dead. 

The marriage that resulted from this strange, short courtship 
presents another phase of the simple manners of these early days. 
While Roman Catholics, though advocating celibacy, exalt mar- 
riage into a sacrament, and others, who do not go that length, 
regard it as an ordinance where the hand of priest or presbyter 
is required to tie the knot, Boaz and Ruth went about forming 
this connection after the simplest fashion. The morning succeed- 
ing their interview he seats himself at the city gate. The man 
who was a degree more nearly related to Ruth than he approaches 
to pass out. His steps are suddenly arrested. “Ho! Such-an- 
one,” cries Boaz ; “ turn aside and sit down here When he had 
done so, with ten of the elders of the city as witnesses and judges 
in the cause, Boaz relates the matter in hand ; and as this man had 
at law a prior claim to Ruth’s hand, he offers her in marriage to 
him. He declines to avail himself of his rights, and thus leaves 
the way clear for Boaz. He himself now claims her, and she 
consents. The elders with the people being taken to witness 
that they become man and wife with their free, mutual, honest 
consent, they are married. That constitutes the marriage. How- 
ever proper may be our custom of accompanying marriage with 
religious services, there was on that occasion no such ceremony — 
nothing more than the blessing, not of any ecclesiastic, but of 
the elders and people, who say, “ The Lord make the woman 
who is to come into thine house like Rachel and like Leah, which 
two did build the house of Israel ; and do thou worthily in Eph- 
ratah and be famous in Bethlehem !” 

This blessing on their nuptials was answered in a way none 
present perhaps ever dreamt of, events hanging on the marriage 


BOAZ. 


227 


that had been so lovingly yet simply entered on, which still direct 
the steps of travelers to its scene, and have made the city of Ruth 
and Boaz famous in the annals of time and in the everlasting 
memories of eternity. It was here that David, Ruth’s great- 
grandson, tended his father’s sheep. The hills around heard the 
first feeble notes of the harp that banished the evil spirit from the 
breast of Saul, and has charmed the Church of God, through suc- 
cessive ages, with its inspired and sacred melodies. These hills 
saw the brave boy encounter both the lion and the bear, and as 
he plucked the prey from their bloody jaws win victories that 
were his confidence when, accepting the challenge of the giant, he 
said, “ The Lord that delivered me from the paw of the lion and 
the paw of the bear, he will deliver me out of the hand of this 
Philistine.” But Ruth was the ancestress, and Bethlehem the 
birthplace, of a greater than David. There the Son of God drew 
his first breath; there the Sun of righteousness arose on a be- 
nighted world with healing in his wings ; there the fountain of 
salvation, the waters of which, if a man drink, he shall never 
thirst more, sprung up sparkling into the light of day. It was 
in the city where Ruth was married the Saviour of the world was 
born ; it was among these hills the shepherds watched their flocks 
by night ; it was over the very fields trodden by this gleaner’s 
feet the glory of the Lord shone forth, and the midnight sky 
suddenly became filled with angels, and mortal ears heard those 
immortals sing, “ Glory to God in the highest, and on earth 
peace, good will toward men !” 



XYI. 

SAMUEL. 

AMUEL was the last judge, the first of the regular suc- 
cession of prophets and the founder of the monarchy. 
So important a position did he hold in Jewish history 
as to have given his name to the sacred book, now 
divided into two, which covers the whole period of the first 
establishment of the kingdom, corresponding to the manner in 
which the name of Moses has been assigned to the sacred book, 
now divided into five, which covers the period of the foundation 
of the Jewish Church itself. In fact, but one character of equal 
magnitude had arisen since the death of the great lawgiver. 

Samuel was the son of Elkanah, a Levite of Mount Ephraim, and 
Hannah or Anna. His father is one of the few private citizens 
in whose household we find polygamy. It may possibly have 
arisen from the irregularity of the period. All that appears with 
certainty of his birthplace is that it was in the hills of Ephraim. 
At the foot of the hill was a well ; on the brow of its two summits 
was the city. It never lost' its hold on Samuel, who in later life 
made it his fixed abode. 

It is on the mother of Samuel that our chief attention is fixed 
in the account of his birth. She is described as a woman of a 
high religious mission. Almost a Nazarite by practice, and a 
prophetess in her gifts, she sought from God the gift of a child 
for which she longed with the passionate devotion of silent prayer, 
of which there is no other example in the Old Testament, and 
228 



SAMUEL. 


229 


when the son was granted, the name which he bore, and thus first 
.ntroduced into the world, expressed her sense of the urgency of 
her entreaty — Samuel, “ the asked or heard of God.” 

Living in the great age of vows, she had before his birth dedi- 
cated him to the office of a Nazarite. As soon as he was weaned, 
she herself with her husband brought him to the tabernacle of 
Shiloh, where she had received the first intimation of his birth, 
and there solemnly consecrated him. From this time the child 
is shut up in the tabernacle. The priests furnished him with a 
sacred garment — an ephod — made, like their own, of white linen, 
though of inferior quality, and his mother every year, apparently 
at the only time of their meeting, gave him a little mantle reach- 
ing down to his feet, such as was worn only by high personages 
or women over the other dress, and such as he retained as his 
badge till the latest times of his life. He seems to have slept 
within the holiest place, and his special duty was to put out the 
sacred candlestick and to open the doors at sunrise. 

In this way his childhood was passed. It was whilst thus 
sleeping in the tabernacle that he received his first prophetic call. 
The stillness of the night, the sudden voice, the childlike miscon- 
ception, the venerable Eli, the contrast between the terrible doom 
and the gentle creature who was to announce it, give to this 
portion of the narrative a universal interest. It is this side of 
Samuel’s career that has been so well caught in the well-known 
picture by Sir Joshua Reynolds. 

From this moment the prophetic character of Samuel was estab- 
lished. His words were treasured up, and Shiloh became the 
resort of those who came to hear him. 1 Sam. iii. 19-21. In the 
overthrow of the sanctuary, which followed shortly on this vision, 
we hear not what became of Samuel. He next appears, probably 
twenty years afterward, suddenly amongst the people, warning 
them against their idolatrous practices. He convened an assem- 
bly at Mizpeh, and there, with a symbolical rite, expressive partly 
of deep humiliation, partly of the libations of a treaty, they poured 


230 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


water on the ground, they fasted, and they entreated Samuel to 
raise the piercing cry for which he was known in supplication 
to God for them. It was at the moment he was offering up a 
sacrifice and sustaining this loud cry that the Philistines’ host 
suddenly burst upon them. A violent thunderstorm, and (accord- 
ing to Josephus) an earthquake, came to the timely assistance of 
Israel. The Philistines fled, and exactly at the spot where, twenty 
years before, they had obtained their great victory, they were 
totally routed. A stone was set up, which long remained as a 
memorial of Samuel’s triumph, and gave to the place its name 
of Eben-ezer (“the stone of help”), which has thence passed into 
Christian phraseology. The old Canaanites, whom the Philistines 
had dispossessed in the outskirts of the Judsean hills, seemed to 
have helped in the battle, and a large portion of territory was 
recovered. This was Samuel’s first, and, as far we know, his 
only, military achievement. But as in the case of the earlier 
chiefs who bore that name, it was apparently this which raised 
him to the office of “judge.” He visited, in discharge of his 
duties as ruler, ihe three chief sanctuaries on the west of Jordan 
— Bethel, Gilgal and Mizpeh. 1 Sam. vii. 16. His own residence 
was still his native city Bamah, which he further consecrated by 
an altar. Here he married, and two sons grew up to repeat under 
his eyes the same perversion of high office that he had himself 
witnessed in his childhood, in the case of the two sons of Eli. 
One was Abiah, the other Joel. In his old age, according to the 
quasi-hereditary principle already adopted by previous judges, 
he shared his power with them, and they exercised their functions 
at the southern frontier in Beersheba. 

Down to this point in Samuel’s life, there is but little to dis- 
tinguish his career from that of his predecessors. Like many 
characters in later days, had he died in youth, his fame would 
hardly have been greater than that of Gideon or Samson. He 
was a judge, a Nazarite, a warrior, and, to a certain point, a 
prophet. 


SAMUEL. 


231 


But bis peculiar position in the sacred narrative turns on the 
events which follow. He was the inaugurator of the transition 
from what is commonly called the theocracy to the monarchy. 
The misdemeanor of his own sons, in receiving bribes and in ex- 
torting exorbitant interest on loans (1 Sam. viii. 3, 4), precipitated 
the catastrophe which had been long preparing. The people de- 
manded a king. Josephus describes the shock to Samuel’s mind, 
“ because of his inborn sense of justice, because of his hatred of 
kings, as so far inferior to the aristocratic form of government, 
which conferred a godlike character on those who lived under it.” 
For the whole night he lay fasting and sleepless, in the perplexity 
of doubt and difficulty. In the vision of that night, as recorded 
by the sacred historian, is given the dark side of the new institu- 
tion, on which Samuel dwells on the following day. 1 Sam. viii. 
9-18. This presents his reluctance to receive the new order of 
things. The whole narrative of the reception and consecration 
of Saul gives his acquiescence in it. 

The final conflict of feeling and surrender of his office is given 
in the last assembly over which he presided, and in his subse- 
quent relations with Saul. The assembly was held at Gilgal, 
immediately after the victory over the Ammonites. The mon- 
archy was a second time solemnly inaugurated. “All the men 
of Israel rejoiced greatly.” Then takes place Samuel’s farewell 
address. By this time the long flowing locks on which no razor 
had ever passed were white with age. 1 Sam. xii. 2. He appeals 
to their knowledge of his integrity. Whatever might have been 
the lawless habits of Eli’s sons, Hophni and Phinehas, or of his 
own sons — he had kept aloof from all. No ox or ass had he taken 
from their stalls — no bribe to obtain his judgment — not even a 
sandal. It is this appeal and the response of the people that has 
made Grotius call him the Jewish Aristides. He then sums up 
the new situation in which they have placed themselves; and 
although “the wickedness of asking a king” is still strongly in- 
sisted on, and the unusual portent of a thunder-storm in May or 


232 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


June, in answer to Samuel’s prayer, is urged as a sign of divine 
displeasure (1 Sam. xii. 16-19), the general tone of the condemna- 
tion is much softened from that which was pronounced on the 
first intimation of the change. The first king is repeatedly ac- 
knowledged as “the Messiah” or “anointed of the Lord;” the 
future prosperity of the nation is declared to depend on their use 
or misuse of the new constitution, and Samuel retires with ex- 
pressions of good will and hope : “ I will teach you the good and 
the right way, . . . only fear the Lord.” 

It is the most signal example atforded in the Old Testament 
of a great character reconciling himself to a changed order of 
things, and of the divine sanction resting on his acquiescence. 

His subsequent relations with Saul are of the same mixed kind. 
The two institutions which they respectively represented ran on 
side by side. Samuel was still judge. He judged “ Israel all the 
days of his life” (1 Sam. vii. 15), and from time to time came 
across the king’s path. But these interventions were chiefly in 
another capacity, which this is the place to unfold. 

Samuel is called emphatically “the prophet.” Acts iii. 24; 
xiii. 20. To a certain extent this was in consequence of the gift 
which he shared in common with others of his time. He was 
especially known in his own age as “ Samuel the seer.” 1 Chron. 
ix. 22 ; xxvi. 28. “ I am the seer,” was his answer to those who 

asked, “Where is the seer?” “Where is the seer’s house?” 
“ Seer,” the ancient name, w T as not yet superseded by “ prophet.” 
Of the three modes by which divine communications were then 
made — “by dreams, Ur im and Thummim, and prophets” — the 
first was- that by which the divine will was made known to 
Samuel. “The Lord uncovered his ear” to whisper into it in 
the stillness of the night the messages that were to be delivered. 
It is the first distinct intimation of the idea of “revelation” to a 
human being. He was consulted far and near on the small affairs 
of life ; loaves of “ bread ” or “ the fourth part of a shekel of sil- 
ver” were paid for the answers. From this faculty, combined 


SAMUEL. 


233 


with his office of ruler, an awful reverence grew up round him. 
No sacrificial feast was thought complete without his blessing. 
When he appeared suddenly elsewhere for the same purpose, the 
villagers “trembled” at his approach. A peculiar virtue was 
believed to reside in his intercessions. He was conspicuous in 
later times amongst those that “ call upon the name of the Lord” 
(Ps. xcix. 6), and was placed with Moses as “standing” — for 
prayer, in a special sense — “ before the Lord.” Jer. xv. 1. It 
was the last consolation he left in his parting address that he 
would “pray to the Lord” for the people. There was something 
peculiar in the long-sustained cry or shout of supplication which 
seemed to draw down as by force the divine answer. 1 Sam. vii. 
8, 9. All night long, in agitated moments, “ he cried unto the 
Lord.” But there are two other points which more especially 
placed him at the head of the prophetic order as it afterward ap- 
peared. The first is brought out in his relation with Saul, the 
second in his relation with David. He represents the independ- 
ence of the moral law, of the divine will, as distinct from regal 
or sacerdotal enactments, which is so remarkable a characteristic 
of all the later prophets. He certainly was not a priest, and all 
the attempts to identify his opposition to Saul with a hierarchical 
interest are founded on a complete misconception of the facts of 
the case. From the time of the overthrow of Shiloh, he never 
appears in the remotest connection with the priestly order. 
Amongst all the places included in his personal or administrative 
visits, neither Shiloh nor Nob nor Gibeon, the seats of the sacer- 
dotal caste, are ever mentioned. When he counsels Saul, it is 
not as the priest, but as the prophet ; when he sacrifices or blesses 
the sacrifice, it is not as the priest, but either as an individual 
Israelite of eminence, or as a ruler, like Saul himself. Saul’s sin 
in both cases where he came into collision with Samuel was not 
of intruding into sacerdotal functions, but of disobedience to the 
prophetic voice. The first was that of not waiting for Samuel’s 
arrival, according to the order given by Samuel at his original 


234 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


meeting at Ramali (1 Sam. x. 8 ; xiii. 8) ; the second was that 
of not carrying out the stern prophetical injunction for the de- 
struction of the Amalekites. When, on that occasion, the aged 
prophet called their captive prince before him, and with his own 
hands hacked him from limb to limb, in retribution for the deso- 
lation he had brought into the homes of Israel, and thus offered 
up his mangled remains almost as a human sacrifice (“ before the 
Lord in Gilgal”), we see the representative of the older part of 
the Jewish history. But it is the true prophetic utterance, such 
as breathes through the psalmists and prophets, when he says to 
Saul, in words which, from their poetical form, must have become 
fixed in the national memory, u To obey is better than sacrifice, 
and to hearken than the fat of rams.” 

The parting was not one of rivals, but of dear though divided 
friends. The king throws himself on the prophet with all his 
force ; not without a vehement effort the prophet tears himself 
away. The long mantle by which he was always known is rent 
in the struggle, and, like Ahijah after him, Samuel saw in this 
the omen of the coming rent in the monarchy. They parted, 
each to his house, to meet no more. But a long shadow of grief 
fell over the prophet. “ Samuel mourned for Saul.” “ It grieved 
Samuel for Saul.” “ How long wilt thou mourn for Saul ?” 

The next point is that he is the first of a regular succession of 
prophets. “ All the prophets from Samuel and those that follow 
after.” Acts iii. 24. The connection of the continuity of the office 
with Samuel appears to be direct. It is in his lifetime, long after 
he had been “ established as a prophet,” that we hear of the com- 
panies of disciples called in the Old Testament “ the sons of the 
prophets.” 

All the peculiarities of their education are implied or expressed 
— the sacred dance, the sacred music, the solemn procession. At 
the head of this congregation, or “ church, as it were, within a 
church,” Samuel is expressly described as “ standing appointed 
over them.” Their chief residence at this time was at Samuel’s 


SAMUEL. 


235 


own abode (Kamah), where they lived in habitations apparently 
of a rustic kind, like the leafy huts which Elisha’s disciples after- 
ward occupied by the Jordan. 

In those schools, and learning to cultivate the prophetic gifts, 
were some whom we know for certain, others whom we may 
almost certainly conjecture, to have been so trained or influenced. 
One was Saul. Twice at least he is described as having been in 
the company of Samuel’s disciples, and as having caught from 
them the prophetic fervor to such a degree as to have “ prophesied 
among them,” and on one occasion to have thrown off his clothes, 
and to have passed the night in a state of prophetic trance ; and 
even in his palace prophesying mingled with his madness on or- 
dinary occasions. 1 Sam. xviii, 10. Another was David. The 
first acquaintance of Samuel with David was when he privately 
anointed him at the house of Jesse. But the connection thus 
begun with the shepherd boy must have been continued after- 
ward. David at first fled to “Naioth in Hamah” as to his second 
home, and the gifts of music, of song and of prophecy, here de- 
veloped on so large a scale, were exactly such as we find in the 
notices of those who looked up to Samuel as their father. It is, 
further, hardly possible to escape the conclusion that David there 
first met his fast friends and companions in after life, prophets 
like himself— Gad and Nathan. 

It is needless to enlarge on the importance with which these 
incidents invest the appearance of Samuel. He there becomes 
the spiritual father of the psalmist king. He is also the founder 
of the first regular institutions of religious instruction and com- 
munities for the purpose of education. The schools of Greece 
were not yet in existence. From these Jewish institutions were 
developed, by a natural order, the universities of Christendom ; 
and it may be further added that with this view the whole life 
of Samuel is in accordance. He is the prophet — the only prophet 
till the time of Isaiah — of whom we know that he was so from his 
earliest years. It is this continuity of his own life and character 


236 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


that makes him so fit an instrument for conducting his nation 
through so great a change. The death of Samuel is described as 
taking place in the year of the close of David’s wanderings. It 
is said with peculiar emphasis, as if to mark the loss, that u all 
the Israelites” — all, with a universality never specified before — 
l( were gathered together” from all parts of this hitherto divided 
country, and “ lamented him” and “ buried him,” not in any 
consecrated place, but within his own house, thus in a manner 
consecrated by being turned into his tomb. 




XVII. 

SATJL. 



S Saul also among the prophets ?” This question, which 
became proverbial, is referred in the Book of Samuel 
to two different incidents in the life of Saul. He is 
said to have met a troop of prophets before he was 
chosen king, when he was known only as the son of Kish the 
Benjamite, and to have been suddenly seized with their spirit. 
He is said in the latter and degenerate period of his reign, when 
he was persecuting David, to have gone down to Ramah in search 
of his son-in-law, “and the Spirit of God came on him, and he 
went on and prophesied until he came to Naioth in Ramah.” It 
is the fashion of our times to suppose that these must be two 
versions of the same fact preserved by different chroniclers and 
brought together by some careless compiler. I venture to think 
that that solution of the difficulty is not a necessary one, not even 
the most probable one. I believe that there occur in most of our 
lives events, often separated by many years, which look as if one 
was the repetition of the other. I fancy that those who reflect 
may discover in such recurring incidents very striking, often very 
sad, memorials of what they have been and of what they are; 
very awful witnesses of their own identity, amidst all the changes 
that have befallen them and the more terrible changes that have 
taken place within them. As it sometimes assists a man’s medi- 
tations to walk amongst the same trees under the shade of which 
he walked, or to watch the sea from the same point from which 

237 


238 


GREAT MEN OF G^D. 


he watched it twenty or thirty years before, so these startling re- 
vivals of past experiences, these relapses into states of feeling that 
have been unknown for a long season, must be more powerful 
revelations to him respecting the unity of the past and present in 
his inward history. And if so, a faithful biographer will be care- 
ful to record such pairs of events. He will find them especially 
useful in making the life of his hero intelligible. They will give 
his reader, though he may not know why, a sense that he is meet- 
ing with an actual man, not merely with a man in a book. 

We shall understand better how this observation applies to 
Saul’s history if we trace it as it is delivered in the Bible. There 
is a way of presenting what is called the rationale of the Bible 
narratives, stripping them of their mystical and theological ad- 
juncts, which I do not profess to follow. If I did, I should have 
to tell you that Saul was chosen by the people of Israel because 
he was the tallest and strongest man among them ; that while the 
novelty of royalty lasted he retained his popularity; that he lost 
it partly through the influence of the prophet Samuel, who feared 
that he was breaking loose from his influence and taking a course 
of his own, and who therefore represented him as having violated 
some of the duties which belonged to a theocratic sovereign ; that 
a young and brilliant rival put forward by this venerated teacher 
supplanted him in the affection of his people, and even of his own 
family ; that jealousy at the admiration which was excited by this 
adventurer, and fear that he would actually obtain the kingdom, 
overthrew his reason ; that he fell into wild, arbitrary and des- 
perate courses, provoked a war with the Philistines and died in 
battle. It seems to some that the records of our book become 
vastly more real when they are put into this modern dress and 
made to look as if they had been taken out of a journal of the 
day. And I do not deny that such paraphrases may be an escape 
from the dryness and formality with which Scripture narratives 
are sometimes offered to us, as if they referred to beings of a dif- 
ferent nature from our own — as if, because they speak of God, 


SAUL. 


239 


they have nothing to do with man. But I venture to doubt 
whether the phraseology of newspapers is, after all, the most real, 
the most human, the most historical — whether the conventional 
formulas which describe so readily and so satisfactorily to our 
minds the causes that produce popular or royal follies or per- 
versities do convey any distinct or living impressions to us — 
whether we must not render the modern dialect back into the 
ancient one from which we have translated it before we can hope 
honestly to understand it, or to bring what passes among our- 
selves into comparison or correspondence with the history that is 
delivered in it. 

For instance, it may be very true and very needful to remem- 
ber that the height of Saul's stature and the comeliness of his 
person had much to do with his being made the first king of Is- 
rael. But if, instead of saying that the people elected him for 
this reason, we follow the Scripture narrative strictly, and say 
that he, being a member of an insignificant family in the smallest 
tribe of Israel, and therefore being most unlikely to be selected 
by the people, and having no dream of any such honor for him- 
self, was marked out by God as the person on whom he would 
bestow it, I believe we shall obtain a light, not upon this fact 
only, but upon a multitude that have occurred in the history of 
the world, which stand in great need of explanation, and which 
are certainly not explained by the commonplaces of ordinary nar- 
rators, even if they call themselves philosophical. In a number 
of cases (the annals of every nation and of almost every age supply 
some) an inconceivably trifling incident — as trifling as that of Saul 
going out in search of his father’s asses — has brought forth the 
man whom a people feel to be, not selected by them, but given to 
them, whom they adopt and embrace, they know not why, and 
who, whether or not he is able to guide and govern them, proves 
to be a faithful representative of their own state of mind, the very 
type and embodiment of that character and those habits of mind 
which they are themselves exhibiting. This is the fact. It has 


240 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


nothing to do with theories about who are or ought to be the 
choosers of a ruler — with the maxims which guide or should 
guide their choice of him. He is there; he comes to them. 
Whether you like it or not, you must refer — you do refer — his 
appearance to some invisible agency. You may call that agency 
chance, if you like. If you know no other name, that is, of course, 
the one which you will resort to. If you are content with it, 
there is no more to be said. But mankind has not been content 
with it. Men have said there must be an order in these events 
apparently so fortuitous. They have insisted upon knowing 
something about that order and who directs it. If now in this 
nineteenth century — this century of science — you choose to say 
there is no order in all this, your language at all events sounds 
as if you were retrograding, not progressing — as if you were fall- 
ing back upon the crudest notions of barbarism. But if not, you 
may listen to the way in which the Scripture accounts for one of 
these instances, and in that one for all, whensoever and where- 
soever they take place. He, it says, who governed the Israelites 
— who was their real King — had taught his judge and prophet 
that he was not to resist the craving of the people — though it was 
a self-willed, idolatrous, mischievous craving — to have a ruler of 
their armies who should make them like the nations round about; 
that he was to yield to them and let them have their way. And 
now, it is said, God appointed the king who would answer to the 
desires of this people, who was the kind of man that they had 
conceived of, cast in their own mould, distinguished from them 
chiefly by mere outward superiority, the very person who would 
cause them to experience that which it was absolutely necessary 
for them to experience. Scripture says that Samuel the prophet 
was taught to perceive that this was the man whom God had 
chosen for them, that he anointed him, and that he became their 
king accordingly. 

We are not told any remarkable points in the character or 
early discipline of the man who was appointed to this office; 


SAUL. 


241 


there were probably none to tell. But as a man not distinguished 
from his fellows by any peculiar gifts — merely a specimen of the 
ordinary, the most ordinary, human material — may nevertheless 
be brought most livingly before us, we may be compelled to feel 
that he is an individual man, one of ourselves, and simply as 
such to care for him. 

We must read the story of Saul’s journey in search of the asses ; 
of his servant’s advice to him about the prophet, “the honorable 
man, the man of God,” whose words would surely come to pass, 
and who might tell them the way they should go ; of the maidens 
coming down the hill to draw water, who told him how the people 
were gone up to the high place to a sacrifice, and how the seer 
would presently come to bless it ; of the first meeting of the Ben- 
jamite with the holy man, and of the wonder with which he 
heard that a portion of the sacrifice was set apart for him, and 
that the desire of Israel was upon him and upon his father’s 
house, — we must read this story oftentimes in order to under- 
stand how a few lines may bring a whole picture before us, and 
make us acquainted with what is passing in a region into which 
a mere picture cannot lead us. The historian does not talk about 
the subjects of his narrative, but shows them to us. All is, in 
the strictest sense of the word, dramatical. The men are made 
known to us in their doings, and we feel that there is a clear 
light falling upon them from above by which we are enabled to 
see them. 

Then comes in that passage in the story of Saul to which I 
alluded before. It is thus foretold to him by Samuel: “When 
thou art departed from me to-day, thou shalt then find two men 
by Rachel’s sepulchre, in the border of Benjamin at Zelzah. 
Then shalt thou go on forward from thence, and thou shalt come 
to the plain of Tabor, and there shall meet thee three men going 
up to God to Bethel, one carrying three kids, and another carry- 
ing three loaves of bread, and another carrying a bottle of wine. 
And they will salute thee and give thee two loaves of bread, 
15 


242 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


which thou shalt receive at their hand. After that thou shalt 
come to the hill of God, where is the garrison of the Philistines. 
And it shall come to pass when thou art come thither to the city, 
that thou shalt meet a company of prophets coming down from 
the high place, with a psaltery, and a tabret, and a pipe, and a 
harp before them, and they shall prophesy. And the Spirit of 
the Lord will come upon thee, and thou shalt prophesy with 
them, and shalt be turned into another man.” 1 Sam. x. 2-6. 

There are moments — you may all have noticed them — in the 
mind of the dullest, most prosaic man, when unknown springs 
seem to be opened in him — when either some new and powerful 
affection, or, quite as often, the sense of a vocation, fills him with 
thoughts and causes him to utter words which are quite alien 
from his ordinary habits, and yet which you are sure he cannot 
have been taught by any other person, they have in them such a 
pledge and savor of originality. You say involuntarily, “He 
seemed for the moment quite inspired ; he became another man.” 
Are you not also half inclined to say, “Now, for the first time, 
the man has come forth. Hitherto a cold, barren nature, or a 
formal education, has choked up the life that was in him; now 
it is bursting through artificial dams, through mud barriers. 
Now we can see what is in him” ? Soon perhaps he sinks back 
into what he was before. There are no more traces of that splen- 
dor than of a sunset after the shades of night have closed in ; but 
it has been ; it has brought something to light which you could 
never have dreamed of but for that momentary appearance ; you 
feel as if you had a right to think of the man, to measure his 
capacity, by that which spoke forth in him at that instant more 
than by all the rest of his existence. 

Now, it is a fact of this kind which this record discloses to us, 
only it is a fact not separated from the law and principle of it, 
but explaining that law and principle to us. “God gave him 
another heart; the Spirit of God came upon him” — these are the 
words which tell us what that prophetic impulse denoted. Then 


SAUL. 


243 


Saul became conscious of thoughts and desires altogether new and 
wonderful. The same earth and skies were about him, but 
he himself was different. He looked upon all things with dif- 
ferent eyes. And this was because the Spirit of God had appre- 
hended him. He could not doubt that God was speaking to him 
down in that region which the vulture’s eye had not seen ; a 
transmuting, life-giving power had penetrated there; it had 
claimed his obedience, and he had yielded to it. He could not 
but connect this power with the office to which he had been so 
suddenly called. How could he be a king if he were still the 
same feeble, paltry creature that he had been ? Did he not need 
some mighty influence to fit him for this work? And was it 
strange that He who chose him for that work should enable him 
to fulfill it ? However unwonted, then, might be the thoughts 
which stirred in him and the words which he poured forth, they 
could not have come from some irregular, tumultuous excite- 
ment ; they must have proceeded from the very spirit of calmness 
and order. Saul was among the prophets precisely because he 
confessed the presence of such a spirit of calmness and order. 
For this was the faith of the prophets, this was the design of 
their appointment, to be witnesses of what they said and what 
they did and what they were — that men, whether they be kings 
or subjects, are not to be the sport of outward accidents and 
chance impulses, but to act habitually as the servants and 
scholars of a divine Master, who can show them the path in 
which they are to go, can give them continual inward illumina- 
tion, can raise them to a point from which they may overlook the 
world around and interpret the course of it. 

This was the preparation and discipline of a king, in all essen- 
tials the discipline and preparation which every ruler requires 
and must undergo who is to rule a people righteously and wisely, 
not following the bent of his own inclinations, not swayed by 
some bias from without, but being under the dominion of an in- 
visible and righteous will, obeying that he may exercise dominion 


244 


GREAT MEN CF GOD. 


over his fellow-men. What the Scripture teaches us in the next 
part of the story is that Saul did not continue the subject of this 
government, and therefore that he became by degrees feeble, 
reckless and tyrannical. The steps of the facilis descensus are 
carefully noted. 

Saul is no monster who has won power by false means, and 
then plunges at once into a reckless abuse of it — no apostate who 
casts off the belief in God and sets up some Ammonite or Phoe- 
nician idol. He merely forgets the Lord and teacher who had 
imparted to him that new life and inspiration ; he merely fails to 
remember that he is under a law and that he has a vocation. 
Samuel, according to modern expositors of the story, was angry 
because he felt that he was losing his own influence over the mind 
of the king. No ; he was angry because the king was so much 
the slave of his influence, or of any influence that was exerted 
over him for the moment — because he was losing the sense of 
responsibility to One higher than a prophet — to One who had 
appointed him to rule, not in his own right, but as the minister 
and executor of the divine righteousness. It was a light trans- 
gression, you will say, that Saul made haste to perform a sacrifice 
without waiting for the person who was appointed by the law to 
perform it. Perhaps you may think it was a sign of the king’s 
devotion ; how could he neglect a religious duty for the sake of 
a formality? But in that indifference to law lay the seeds of 
arbitrary government, the pretensions of an autocrat. In that 
eagerness to do a religious service lay the seeds of the super- 
stition which God by his covenant and statutes was undermining, 
since all superstition lies in the neglect of the truth which Samuel 
proclaimed, that obedience is better than the fat of rams, that 
sacrifices are not to buy God’s good will, but are acts of sub- 
mission to it. It may seem to some as if Samuel was enjoining 
a very rigorous course when he complained of Saul for sparing 
Agag the king of the Amalekites, and the best of the flocks and 
herds. But a king who let his people rush upon the prey when 


SAUL. 


245 


they were sent to punish an unrighteous nation, the crimes of 
which had reached a full measure, was forgetting the very func- 
tions of a Jewish sovereign, and was turning conquest into that 
which it was not to be — a gratification of covetousness, a means 
of aggrandizement. The king who heeded the voice of his army 
in such a matter showed that he was not their leader, but their 
tool and slave. The king who pretended to keep the booty for 
the purpose of offering sacrifice to the Lord his God, was evi- 
dently beginning to play the hypocrite — to make the service of 
God an excuse for acts of selfishness, and so to introduce all that 
is vilest in kingcraft as well as priestcraft. Samuel the prophet 
was not trying to keep alive the habits which these names ex- 
press, that he might maintain the dignity of his own office. That 
office enjoined him to bear the most emphatical protest against 
them. He was bound to tell Saul that if he forgot that he was a 
servant, and fancied himself absolute, his true condition would be 
shown him, for that the kingdom would be rent from him and 
given to another. 

The next passages of the story belong properly to the history 
of David, but the progress of Saul’s fear and jealousy of the young 
man concerning whom the virgins of Israel sang, “Saul has slain 
his thousands, but David has slain his tens of thousands,” is a 
part of the present subject. There are many ways, no doubt, of 
describing how such a passion as this enters the soul and takes a 
direction toward a person who had once been loved, is baffled for 
a while, sometimes gives way to fits of returning affection, then 
absorbs the man completely, till it becomes an ungoverned frenzy, 
prompting the most extravagant and ferocious acts. But I think 
that one who is considering the subject in earnest, trying to turn 
it to account for himself and his fellow-men, will do well to pause 
before he abandons the language in which the Bible speaks of 
this awful mental process and takes up with any other. It tells 
us that “ the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil 
spirit from the Lord troubled him.” This was before David had 


246 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


awakened his fears, while lie was still a shepherd boy, sent for to 
soothe him with his harp. The words therefore describe an 
earlier state of mind — one which the story we have considered 
already will make sufficiently clear to us. That calm spirit of 
trust and hope which had once come upon Saul had been resisted 
and grieved ; he had forgotten that such a spirit had been given 
him to be his guide and counselor, his wisdom to understand 
God’s commands, his strength to obey them. And now there 
had come an evil spirit from the Lord, an accusing conscience 
warning him of what he had been, throwing its dark shadow 
upon the present, making the future look dim and gloomy. All 
ghastly apparitions haunt a mind in this condition. It sees 
nothing as it is. It sees innumerable things which are not. 
Much physical disease probably attends the moral derangement. 
The palpable and monstrous distortions which arise out of it are 
such as friends naturally seek to cure by outward applications 
and diversions. The servants of Saul, who could not probe the 
seat of their master’s disorder, suggested the wisest of all methods 
for removing its external symptoms. The music was more than 
a mere palliative. It brought back for the time the sense of a 
true order, a secret, inward harmony, an assurance that it is near 
every man and that he may enter into it. A wonderful message, 
no doubt, to a king or a common man, better than a great multi- 
tude of words — a continual prophecy that there is a Deliverer 
who can take the vulture from the heart and unbind the sufferer 
from the rock, but not (as many, I suppose, must bitterly know) 
the deliverer itself. 

And therefore, at the next turn of the story, the evil spirit has 
become an evil spirit indeed. It is still called an evil spirit 
“from the Lord.” For that which torments us, and does not 
suffer us to sink into the ease and security we long for, has surely 
a commission from God for our good, though it come with a 
thousand dark suggestions which cannot be from him, which are 
perpetual incitements to rebellion against him. But now this 


SAUL. 


247 


spirit which was preying upon the man himself has found another 
object ; it has become a gnawing suspicion and hatred against an 
innocent man — a feeling that he has some deep plot against the 
life of his king, and that all Saul’s children are plotting with 
him. Surely this feeling of suspicion better explains to us than 
anything else the nature of the retribution which a man brings 
upon himself by tampering with evil thoughts and imaginations, 
by trifling with the loving power which is so close to him, and so 
ready to nourish him with wholesome and gracious food. Every 
one of us perhaps has had converse enough with this demon, has 
dallied enough with his dark hints, to know how true the Scrip- 
ture portrait must be, even though, by God’s great mercy, we 
may have been saved from catching the entire likeness of it. 
Awful as is the misery which the indulgence of this sin causes to 
others, yet the punishment which it inflicts upon the heart that 
is the seat of it, the madness which it produces there, is something 
more terrible still. We are surely warranted in hoping that in 
a multitude of cases it is a healing discipline — that the utter 
humiliation which it produces works out blessings, though they 
may never appear, though the soul may seem to sink and go out 
in utter bewilderment and desolation. 

I have not tried to ascertain the point at which the moral guilt 
of Saul ends and his madness begins. The Bible does not hint 
at a settlement of that question. It belongs in this case, as in all 
cases, to Him who said, “ Judge not, that ye be not judged, for 
with what judgment ye judge ye shall be judged, and with what 
measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again.” It is enough 
for us to know, and to tremble as we know, that the loss of all 
capacity for discerning between right and wrong, a hopeless in- 
version of rule and order, a loss of all the kingly faculties which 
enable us to exercise an influence over others or ourselves, may 
be the rightful and natural result of indulging any one hateful 
passion, of forgetting the special work which God has committed 
to us, of acting as if we were our own masters and could do with- 


248 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


out him. On the other hand, it is for the relief and comfort of 
our minds to believe — as we are taught to believe by all law- 
givers and moralists — that there are conditions of rumd to which 
we must not and dare not impute moral delinquency; a still 
greater and deeper comfort to know that in these conditions, as 
well as in those where there is most of willful wrong, God may 
still be carrying on his own great and wonderful work of “ bring- 
ing souls out of darkness and the shadow of death, of breaking 
their bonds asunder.” 

There are glimpses of light in the later life of Saul which we 
refer at once to this divine source, which it would be sinful to 
refer to any other. The love and loyalty of David in sparing 
his life were not unrewarded. They struck out sparks of love in 
him ; they made it evident that there was something deeper and 
healthier beneath all his strangest distortions of mind. And that 
sacred inspiration which recalled the almost forgotten question, 
“ Is Saul also among the prophets ?” though it came mixed with 
a kind of wild insanity — though it was no longer the prophetical 
utterance of a calm, heaven-possessed soul — though it was like 
the sound of the wind through a broken and fallen building — yet 
proclaimed that God’s Spirit, which bloweth where it listeth, 
had not left this building to be a mere possession for the birds 
of night. 

Even in the last act which is recorded of Saul on the night 
before his death — his resorting to the witches whom he had him- 
self forbidden — there is a strange and mad confusion between a 
real desire to know the mind of God and a feeling that to him it 
could only be declared through some evil agent. He has a long- 
ing to see the friend of his youth, the true counselor from whom 
he had severed himself. When the presence of the reprover and 
friend is felt, and his awful accents heard, Saul “ fell straightway 
all along on the earth, and was sore afraid because of the words 
of Samuel, and there was no strength in him.” 

A strange preparation for the fight on the :oming day, when 


SAUL. 


249 


“ the men of Israel fled from before the Philistines, and fell down 
slain in Mount Gilboa. And the Philistines followed hard upon 
Saul, and upon his sons. And the Philistines slew Jonathan, 
and Abinadab, and Melchishua, Saul’s sons. And the battle 
went sore against Saul, and the archers hit him, and he was sore 
wounded of the archers. Then said Saul unto his armor-bearer, 
Draw thy sword and thrust me through therewith, lest the un- 
circumcised come and thrust me through and abuse me. But his 
armor-bearer would not, for he was sore afraid. Therefore Saul 
took a sword and fell upon it. And when his armor-bearer saw 
that Saul was dead, he fell likewise upon his sword, and died 
with him. So Saul died, and his three sons, and his armor- 
bearer, and all his men, that same day together. And when the 
men of Israel that were on the other side of the valley, and they 
that were on the other side Jordan, saw that the men of Israel 
fled, and that Saul and his sons were dead, they forsook the cities 
and fled, and the Philistines came and dwelt in them. And the 
Philistines put Saul’s armor in the house of Ashtaroth, and they 
fastened his body to the wall of Bethshan.” 1 Sam. xxxi. This 
was the end of Saul and of his kingdom. 

He who was to be the restorer of this kingdom sang of Saul 
and Jonathan on the day when he heard of their fall, “They 
were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they 
were not divided.” Was this an idle flattery, by one who knew 
it to be false, of a man whom flattery could please no longer ? I 
believe it was nothing of the kind. David spoke what he felt at 
that moment, and he would not have wished to recall the words 
afterward. He had known a loveliness and pleasantness in the 
life of Saul which all its after discords could not make him for- 
get. He had known a real man under the name. A false man 
had borne it too. The one was dead ; the other was still alive in 
his memory and heart. Other questions, agitating, perplexing, 
almost maddening, he could leave to Him who only could resolve 
them. There were symbols of reconciliation in the deaths of 


250 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


Saul and Jonathan. The father and son who had been often so 
unnaturally separated were united at last. David was privi- 
leged to think of them together, to let the tenderness of the 
one efface the hard treatment of the other ; to feel that God 
had meant them to be one in heart and act, though the evil 
and dark spirit to which Saul had yielded himself tore them 
asunder. 

Brethren, I believe it is not dangerous, but safe — not a homage 
to falsehood, but to truth — in our judgment of those who are de- 
parted, to follow David’s example. We may dwell upon bright 
and hallowed moments of lives that have been darkened by many 
shadows, polluted by many sins; those moments may be wel- 
comed as revelations to us of that which God intended his crea- 
tures to be; we may feel that there has been a loveliness in them 
which God gave them, and which their own evil could not take 
away. We may think of this loveliness as if it expressed the 
inner purpose of their existence ; the rest may be for us as though 
it were not. As Nature, with her old mosses and her new spring 
foliage, hides the ruins which man has made, and gives to the 
fallen tower and broken cloister a beauty scarcely less than that 
which belonged to them in their prime, so human love may be 
at work too, “softening and concealing, and busy with her hand 
in healing,” the rents which have been made in God’s nobler 
temple, the habitation of his own Spirit. If it were lawful in the 
old time to cover with love and hope a multitude of transgressions, 
it cannot be less lawful now that the earth is overshadowed with 
a mercy that blotteth out iniquity and transgression and sin — 
when the blood of sprinkling has a mightier voice than that 
which cries for vengeance — when the atoning sacrifice reveals 
heights and lengths and depths and breadths of love in which we 
must rejoice to be lost. 

But oh, brethren, if this be a lesson which it is lawful to take 
up and apply to our friends and brethren, it should come in 
another form, with another force, to ourselves. There has been 


SAUL. 


251 


some moment — some one fleeting moment — in the life of every 
man, even the most thoughtless, when he has had dreams of 
better things — when he has heard the voices of the prophets 
coming with their harp and their tabret down the hill — when he 
has joined their company and has caught their strains. There 
may have been a time when it has been said of him, “ What ! is 
he too among the prophets? Has he found that life is real, and 
that it is not to go out in miserable efforts for self-advancement, 
or in more miserable self-indulgence; that it is to be consecrated 
to the service of God and man ?” That hour, that moment, was 
the hour, the moment, of thy life, friend and brother. To that, 
God would raise and assimilate the whole of it. Oh, do not let 
the sluggish, turbid current of your ordinary days seem to you 
that which truly represents to you what you are, what you are 
able to be! No; the time when you made the holiest resolu- 
tions — when you struggled most with the powers of evil — when 
you said it should not be your master — when Love conquered you 
and freed you from other chains, that you might wear her chains, 
— that, that was the true index to the divine purpose concerning 
you — that tells you what the Spirit of God is every hour work- 
ing in you that you may be. You may not be able to revive the 
feeling which you had then, but He who gave you the feeling, he 
is with you, is striving with you, that you may will and do of his 
good pleasure; only do not strive with him that he may leave 
you to yourself and to the power of evil. 

But if you should have engaged in that mad struggle, and 
been, to your own ruin, a conqueror in it — if you should have 
succeeded in quenching that voice of love which you once heard 
speaking in your heart, and now you can hear nothing but hoarse 
and dissonant voices of evil omen — oh, yet be sure that the Spirit 
of God does not desert the work of his own hands — that he is 
still hovering about the habitation in which he desires to dwell. 
And if, when you meet with old friends from whom you have 
been long estranged, there should come back something of the 


252 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


youthful impulse, some of those heart-yearnings and songs of 
hope which you poured forth then, though mixed with turbulence 
and confusion, and hardly to be distinguished from the ravings 
of madness, yet the question may be asked again, “Is he too 
among the prophets?” and God will answer that question as it 
was not answered before if you desire not the power of the 
prophets, but their obedience— not that you may speak inspired 
words, but that you may have the humble and contrite heart 
which he does not despise. 





XVIII. 

JONATHAN. 

JONATHAN was the eldest son of King Saul. The 
name — “ the gift of Jehovah,” corresponding to Theo- 
doras in Greek — seems to have been common at that 
period. He first appears some time after his father’s 
accession. Of his own family we know nothing except the birth 
of one son, five years before his death. He was regarded in his 
father’s lifetime as heir to the throne. Like Saul, he was a man 
of great strength and activity, of which the exploit at Michmash 
was a proof. He was also famous for the peculiar martial exer- 
cises in which his tribe excelled — archery and slinging. His bow 
was to him what the spear was to his father : “ The bow of Jona- 
than turned not back.” It was always about him. It is through 
his relation to David that he is chiefly known to us, probably as 
related by his descendants at David’s court. But there is a back- 
ground, not so clearly given, of his relation with his father. 
From the time that he first appears he is Saul’s constant com- 
panion. He was always present at his father’s meals. As Abner 
and David seem to have occupied the places afterward called the 
captaincies of “the host” and “of the guard,” so he seems to 
have been (as Hushai afterward) “ the friend.” The whole story 
implies, without expressing, the deep attachment of the father 
and son. Jonathan can only go on his dangerous expedition 

(1 Sam. xiv. 1) by concealing it from Saul. Saul’s vow is con- 

253 


254 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


firmed, and its tragic effect deepened, by his feeling for his son, 
“though it be Jonathan my son.” “Tell me what thou hast 
done.” Jonathan cannot bear to believe his father’s enmity to 
David : “ My father will do nothing great or small, but that he 
will show it to me : and why should my father hide this thing 
from me? it is not so.” To him, if to any one, the wild frenzy 
of the king was amenable — “ Saul hearkened unto the voice of 
Jonathan.” Their mutual affection was indeed interrupted by 
the growth of Saul’s insanity. Twice the father would have 
sacrificed the son : once in consequence of his vow. 1 Sam. xiv. 
The second time, more deliberately, on the discovery of David’s 
flight ; and oh this last occasion a momentary glimpse is given 
of some darker history. Were the phrases, “son of a perverse, 
rebellious woman,” etc., mere frantic invectives? or was there 
something in the story of Ahinoam or Pizpah which we do not 
know? “In fierce anger” Jonathan left the royal presence, but 
he cast his lot with his father’s decline, not with his friend’s rise, 
and “in death they were not divided.” His life may be divided 
into two main parts: 1. The war with the Philistines, commonly 
called, from its locality, “ the war of Michmash.” He is already 
of great importance in the state. Of the three thousand men of 
whom Saul’s standing army was formed, one thousand w r ere under 
the command of Jonathan at Gibeah. The Philistines were still 
in the general command of the country; an officer was stationed 
at Geba, either the same as Jonathan’s position or close to it. In 
a sudden act of youthful daring — as when Tell rose against Gesler, 
or, as in sacred history, Moses rose against the Egyptian — Jona- 
than slew this officer, and thus gave the signal for a general revolt. 
Saul took advantage of it, and the whole population rose, but it 
was a premature attempt. The Philistines poured in from the 
plain, and the tyranny became more deeply rooted than ever. 
Saul and Jonathan (with their immediate attendants) alone had 
arms amidst the general weakness and disarming of the people. 
They were encamped at Gibeah, with a small body of six hundred 


JONATHAN. 


255 


men ; and as they looked down from that height on the misfor- 
tunes of their country, and of their native tribe especially, they 
wept aloud. From this oppression, as Jonathan by his former 
act had been the first to provoke it, so now he was the first to 
deliver his people. On the former occasion Saul had been equally 
with himself involved in the responsibility of the deed. Saul 
“ blew the trumpet;” Saul had “ smitten the officer of the Philis- 
tines.” But now it would seem that Jonathan was resolved to 
undertake the whole risk himself. “The day” — the day fixed 
by him — approached ; and without communicating his project to 
any one except the young man whom, like all the chiefs of that 
age, he retained as his armor-bearer, he sallied forth from Gibeah 
to attack the garrison of the Philistines stationed on the other 
side of the steep defile of Michmash. His words are short, but 
they breathe exactly the ancient and peculiar spirit of the Israelite 
warrior : “ Come, and let us go over unto the garrison of these 
uncircumcised ; it may be that Jehovah will work for us : for 
there is no restraint to Jehovah to save by many or by few.” 
The answer is no less characteristic of the close friendship of the 
two young men, already like to that which afterward sprang up 
between Jonathan and David: “Do all that is in thine heart; . . . 
behold I am with thee; as thy heart is my heart.” After the 
manner of the time, Jonathan proposed to draw an omen for their 
course from the conduct of the enemy. If the garrison, on seeing 
them, gave intimations of descending upon them, they would re- 
main in the valley ; if, on the other hand, they raised a challenge 
to advance, they were to accept it. The latter turned out to be 
the case. The first appearance of the two warriors from behind 
the rocks was taken by the Philistines as a furtive apparition of 
“ the Hebrews coming forth out of the holes where they had hid 
themselves,” and they were welcomed with a scoffing invitation : 
“Come up, and we will show you a thing.” Jonathan imme- 
diately took them at their word. Strong and active as he was — 
“strong as a lion, and swift as an eagle” — he was fully equal tc 


256 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


the adventure of climbing on his hands and feet up the face of the 
cliff. When he came directly in view of them, with his armor- 
bearer behind him, they both, after the manner of their tribe, 
discharged a flight of arrows, stones and pebbles from their bows, 
cross-bows and slings, with such effect that twenty men fell at the 
first onset. A panic seized the garrison, thence spread to the 
camp, and thence to the surrounding hordes of marauders; an 
earthquake combined with the terror of the moment; the con- 
fusion increased ; the Israelites who had been taken slaves by the 
Philistines during the last three days rose in mutiny; the Is- 
raelites who lay hid in the numerous caverns and deep holes in 
which the rocks of the neighborhood abound sprang out of their 
subterranean dwellings. Saul and his little band had watched in 
astonishment the wild retreat from the heights of Gibeah; he 
now joined in the pursuit, which led him headlong after the fugi- 
tives, over the rugged plateau of Bethel, and down the path of 
Bethhoron to Ajalon. The father and son had not met on that 
day; Saul only conjectured his son’s absence from not finding 
him when he numbered the people. Jonathan had not heard of 
the rash curse which Saul invoked on any one who ate before the 
evening. In the dizziness and darkness which came on after his 
desperate exertions, he put forth the staff* which apparently had 
(with his sling and bow) been his chief weapon, and tasted the 
honey which lay on the ground as they passed through the forest. 
The pursuers in general were restrained even from this slight in- 
dulgence by fear of the royal curse ; but the moment that the day, 
with its enforced fast, was over, they flew, like Moslems at sunset 
during the fast of Ramadan, on the captured cattle, and devoured 
them, even to the brutal neglect of the law which forbade the dis- 
memberment of the fresh carcasses with the blood. This viola- 
tion of the law Saul endeavored to prevent and to expiate by 
erecting a large stone, which served both as a rude table and as 
an altar — the first altar that was raised under the monarchy. It 
was in the dead of night, after this wild revel was over, that he 


JONATHAN. 


257 


proposed that the pursuit should be continued till dawn ; and 
then, when the silence of the oracle of the high priest indicated 
that something had occurred to intercept the divine favor, the lot 
was tried, and Jonathan appeared as the culprit. Jephthah’s 
dreadful sacrifice would have been repeated, but the people inter- 
posed in behalf of the hero of that great day, and Jonathan was 
saved. 1 Sam. xiv. 24-26. 

This is the only great exploit of Jonathan’s life. But the chief 
interest of his career is derived from the friendship with David 
which began on the day of David’s return from the victory over 
the champion of Gath, and continued till his death. It is the 
first biblical instance of a romantic friendship, such as was com- 
mon afterward in Greece and has been since in Christendom, and 
is remarkable both as giving its sanction to these, and is filled 
with a pathos of its own which has been imitated, but never sur- 
passed, in modern works of fiction. “ The soul of Jonathan was 
knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own 
soul.” “Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of 
women.” Each found in each the affection that he found not 
in his own family; no jealousy of rivalry between the two, as 
claimants for the same throne, ever interposed: “Thou shalt be 
king in Israel, and I shall be next unto thee.” The friendship 
was confirmed, after the manner of the time, by a solemn compact 
often repeated. The first was immediately on their first acquaint- 
ance. Jonathan gave David as a pledge his royal mantle, his 
sword, his girdle and his famous bow. His fidelity was soon 
called into action by the insane rage of his father against David. 
He interceded for his life, at first with success. Then the mad- 
ness returned, and David fled. It was in a secret interview during 
this flight, by the stone of Ezel, that the second covenant was 
made between the two friends of a still more binding kind, ex- 
tending to their mutual posterity, Jonathan laying such emphasis 
on this portion of the compact as almost to suggest the belief of a 
slight misgiving on his part of David’s future conduct in this 
17 


258 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


respect. It is this interview which brings out the character of 
Jonathan in the liveliest colors — his little artifices — his love for 
both his father and his friend — his bitter disappointment at his 
father’s unmanageable fury — his familiar sport of archery. With 
passionate embraces and tears the two friends parted, to meet only 
once more ; that one more meeting was far away in the forest of 
Ziph, during Saul’s pursuit of David. Jonathan’s alarm for his 
friend’s life is now changed into a confidence that he will escape : 
“ He strengthened his hand in God.” Finally, and for the third 
time, they renewed the covenant, and then parted for ever. 1 Sam. 
xxiii. 16-18. From this time forth we hear no more till the 
battle of Gilboa. In that battle he fell, with his two brothers 
and his father, and his corpse shared their fate. The news of his 
death occasioned the celebrated elegy of David, in which he, as 
the friend, naturally occupies the chief place, and which seems to 
have been sung in the education of the archers of Judah, in com- 
memoration of the one great archer, Jonathan : “ He bade them 
teach the children of Judah the use of the bow.” 











































































































I 




Nelson 


fsC 


h 


r 











XIX. 

DAVID. 

O character has suffered more than that of David, from 
all sorts of imperfect appreciation. While some have 
treated him as a monster of cruelty and lust, classing 
him with the Neros and Domitians, others have in- 
vested him with almost divine immunities, as if we had no more 
right to ask at him than at God, “ What dost thou ?” — as if his 
motions had been irrepressible as those of the wind, and his 
vengeance inevitable as the thunderbolt. David, in our view of 
him, was neither a monster nor a deity — neither a bad man nor 
by any means the highest of Scripture worthies. William Hazlitt 
has nowhere more disgraced his talents than in a wretched paper 
in the Round Table , where he describes David as a crowned 
spiritual hypocrite, passing from debasing sins to debasing ser- 
vices — debauching Bathsheba, murdering Uriah, and then going 
to the top of his palace and singing out his penitence in strains 
of hollow melody. Paine himself never uttered a coarser 
calumny than this. Nor ever did the pure and lofty spirit of 
Edward Irving look nobler and speak in higher tones than 
w T hen, in his preface to Horne on the Psalms , he gives a mild yet 
stern verdict upon the character of this royal bard — a verdict 
in which judgment and mercy are both found, but with “ mercy 
rejoicing against judgment.” Many years have elapsed since 
we read that paper, and should our views, now to be given, 
happen, as we hope, to be found to coincide with it, we must 



260 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


still claim them as our own. We remember little more than its 
tone and spirit. 

David was a composite, though not a chaotic, formation. At 
first we find him as simple and noble a child of God, nature and 
genius as ever breathed. A shepherd boy, watching now the 
lambs and now the stars, his sleep is peradventure haunted by 
dreams of high enterprise and coming glory, but his days are 
calm and peaceful as those of the boy in the Valley of Humilia- 
tion who carried the herb “ heart’s-ease” in his bosom, and sang 
(next to David’s own twenty-third Psalm) the sweetest of all 
pastorals, closing with the lines, 

“ Here little, and hereafter bliss, 

Is best from age to age .” 1 

And yet this boy had done, even ere he went to the camp of Is- 
rael, one deed of “ derring-do he had wet his hands in the 
blood of a lion and a bear. This had given him a modest sense 
of his own strength, and perhaps begun to circulate a secret thrill 
of ambition throughout his veins ; and when he obeyed the com- 
mand of Jesse to repair to his brethren in the host, it might be 
with a foreboding of triumph and a smelling of the battle afar 
off. We can conceive few subjects fitter for picture or poetry 
than that of the young David measuring the mass of steel — 
Goliath — with an eye which mingled in its ray wonder, eager- 
ness, anger and 

" That stern joy which warriors feel 
In foemen worthy of their steel.” 

A hundred battles looked forth in that lingering, longing, in- 
satiate glance. Every one knows the result to the giant of Gath : 
he fell before the smooth sling-stone. The result on David’s 
mind is not quite so evident ; but we think that all the praises 
and promotion he received did not materially affect the simplicity 
of his habits or the integrity of his purposes. Nor did, at first, 

1 Pilgrim’s Progress. 


DAVID. 


261 


the persecution of Saul much exasperate his spirit, balanced as 
that was by the love of Jonathan. But his long-continued flight 
and exile, the insecurity of his life, the converse he had with 
“wild men and wild usages” in the cave of Adullam and the 
wilderness of Ziph, although they failed in weaning him from his 
God or his Jonathan, or even Saul, did not fail somewhat to em- 
bitter his generous nature and to render him less fitted for bearing 
the prosperity which suddenly broke upon him. More men are 
prepared for sudden death than for sudden success. Even after 
he had reached the throne of his father-in-law, there remained 
long, obscure contests with the remnant of Saul’s party, sudden 
inroads from the Philistines, and a sullen, dead resistance on the 
part of the old heathen inhabitants of the land, to annoy his 
spirit. And when afterward he had brought up the ark of the 
Lord to the city of David — when the Philistines were bridled, 
the Syrians smitten, the Ammonites chastised, and their city on 
the point of being taken — from this very pride of place David 
fell — fell foully — but fell not for ever. From that hour his life 
ran on in a current of disaster checkered with splendid successes ; 
it was a tract of irregular and ragged glory, tempering at last 
into a troubled yet beautiful sunset. But all the elements for 
our judgment of it had been collected by the time that the “ mat- 
ter of Uriah” was fully transacted. 

A noble nature, stung before its sin and seared before its time — 
contending between the whirlpool of passion and the strong, still 
impulses of poetry and faith — ruling all spirits except his own, 
and yet for ever seeking to regulate it too — sincere in all things — 
in sin and repentance, but sincerest in repentance — often neglect- 
ing the special precept, but ever loving the general tenor of the 
law — unreconciled to his age or circumstances, and yet always 
striving after such a reconciliation — harassed by early grief, great 
temptations, terrible trials in advanced life, and views necessarily 
dim and imperfect, — David, nevertheless, retained to the last his 
heart, his intellect, his simplicity, his devotion, above all, his sin- 


262 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


cerity, loved his God, saw from afar off his Kedeemer ; and let 
the man who is “ without sin ” among his detractors cast the first 
stone. His character is checkered , but the stripes outnumber the 
stains, and the streaks of light outnumber both. In his life there 
is no lurking-place — all is plain; the heights are mountains — 
“ the hills of holiness,” where a fine spirit walks abroad in sing- 
ing robes ; the valleys are depths out of which you hear the voice 
of a prostrate penitent pleading for mercy, but nothing is or can 
be concealed, since it is God’s face which shows both the lights 
and shadows of the scene. David, if not the greatest or best of 
inspired men, was certainly one of the most extraordinary. You 
must try him not, indeed, by divine or angelic comparison ; but 
if there be any allowance for the aberration of a tortured, child- 
like, devout son of genius — if the nobler beasts of the wilderness 
themselves obey a law and observe a chronology and follow a 
path of their own — then let the wanderer of Adullam be per- 
mitted to enter or to leave his cave at his own time and in his 
own way, seeing that his wanderings were never intended for a 
map to others, and that those who follow are sure to find that 
they are aught but ways of pleasantness or of peace to them. 

The position of David is virtually that of the founder of the 
Jewish monarchy. In this sense his name is repeated in every 
possible form. “The city of David,” “The seed of David,” 
“ The house of David,” “ The key of David,” “ The oath sworn 
unto David,” are expressions which pervade the whole subse- 
quent history and poetry of the Old Testament and much of the 
figurative language of the New. The cruelty, the self-indulgence, 
the too-ready falsehood, sufficiently appear in the events of his 
history. But there was a grace, a charm, about him which en- 
twined the affections of the nation round his person and his 
memory, and made him, in spite of the savage manners of the 
time and the wildness of his own life, at once the centre of some- 
thing like a court, the head of a new civilization. He was a 
born king of Israel by his natural gifts. His immense activity 


DAVID. 


263 


and martial spirit united him by a natural succession to the 
earlier chiefs of Israel, whilst his accomplishments and genius 
fitted him especially to exercise a vast control over the whole 
future greatness of the Church and commonwealth. 

The force and passion of the ruder age was blended with a 
depth of emotion which broke out in every relation of life. 
Never before had there been such a faithful friend, such an affec- 
tionate father. Never before had king or chief inspired such 
passionate loyalty or given it back in equal degree. The tender- 
ness of his personal affection penetrated his public life. He 
loved his people with a pathetic compassion beyond even that of 
Moses. Even from the history we gather that the ancient fear 
of God was, for the first time, passing into the love of God. 

He is the “ man after God’s own heart,” not in the sense of 
a faultless saint — far from it, even according to the defective 
standard of Jewish morality ; still farther from it if we compare 
him with the Christianity of a civilized age; but in the sense of 
the man who was chosen for his own especial work — the work 
of pushing forward his nation into an entirely new position, both 
religious and social. 

But the hold which David has fixed on the memory of the 
Church and the world is of a deeper kind than any which he 
derives even from the romance of his life or the attractiveness of 
his character. He was not only the founder of the monarchy, 
but the founder of the Psalter. He is the first great poet of Is- 
rael. Although before his time there had been occasional bursts 
of Hebrew poetry, yet David is the first who gave it its fixed 
place in the Israelite worship. There is no room for it in the 
Mosaic ritual. Its absence there may be counted as a proof of 
the antiquity of that ritual in all its substantial features. For so 
mighty an innovation no less than a David was needed. That 
strange musical world of the East — with its gongs and horns and 
pipes and harps — with its wild dances and wilder contortions — 
with its songs of question and answer, of strophe and antistrophe, 


264 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


awakening or soothing, to a degree inconceivable in our tamer 
West, the emotions of the hearer — was seized by the shepherd 
minstrel when he mounted the throne, and was formed as his 
own peculiar province into a great ecclesiastical institution. The 
exquisite richness of verse and music so dear to him — “ the calves 
of the lips” — took the place of the costly offerings of animals. 
His harp — or as it was called by the Greek translators, his 
“ psaltery” or il psalter” or guitar — was to him what the wonder- 
working staff was to Moses, the spear to Joshua, or the sword to 
Gideon. It was with him in his early youth. It was at hand in 
the most moving escapes of his middle life. In his last words he 
seemed to be himself the instrument over which the divine breath 
passed. United with these poetic powers was a grace so nearly 
akin to the prophetic gift that he has received the rank of a 
prophet, though not actually trained or called to the office. By 
these gifts he became in his life, and still more in his writings, a 
prophet, a revealer of a new world of religious truth, only in- 
ferior, if inferior, to Moses himself. 

The Psalter, thus inaugurated, opened a new door into the side 
of sacred literature. Hymn after hymn was added, altered, ac- 
commodated, according to the need of the time. And not only 
so, but under the shelter of this irregular accretion of hymns of 
all ages and all occasions, other books, which had no claim to be 
considered either of the law or of the prophets, forced an entrance 
and were classed under the common title of “ The Psalms,” though 
including books as unlike to each other and to the “ Psalter” as 
Ruth and Ecclesiastes, Chronicles and Daniel. But even without 
reckoning these accompaniments, the Book of Psalms is, as it 
were, a little Bible in itself. It is a Bible within a Bible, in 
which most of the peculiarities, inward and outward, of the rest 
of t-lip sacred volume are concentrated. As, on the one hand, we 
gratefully acknowledge the single impulse which brought the 
book into existence, we recognize no less, on the other hand, the 
many illustrious poets whose works, underneath that single name, 


DAVID. 


2 65 


Have come down to us, unknown, yet hardly less truly the 
offspring of David’s mind than had they sprung directly from 
himself. 

The Psalter, thus freely composed, has further become the 
sacred book of the world in a sense belonging to no other part 
of the biblical records. Not only does it hold its place in the 
liturgical services of the Jewish Church — not only was it used 
more than any other part of the Old Testament by the writers 
of the New — but it is in a special sense the peculiar inheritance 
of the Christian Church through all its different branches. 

And if we descend from Churches to individuals, there is no 
one book which has played so large a part in the history of so 
many human souls. By the Psalms, Augustine was consoled on 
his conversion and on his deathbed. By the Psalms, Chrysos- 
tom, Athanasius, Savonarola were cheered in persecution. With 
the words of a Psalm, Polycarp, Columba, Hildebrand, Bernard, 
Francis of Assisi, Huss, Jerome of Prague, Columbus, Henry the 
Fifth, Edward the Sixth, Ximenes, Xavier, Melanchthon, Jewell, 
breathed their last. So dear to Wallace in his wanderings was 
his Psalter that, during his execution, he had it hung before him, 
and his eyes remained fixed upon it as the one consolation of his 
dying hours. The unhappy Darnley was soothed in the toils of 
his enemies by the fifty-fifth Psalm. The sixty-eighth cheered 
Cromwell’s soldiers to victory at Dunbar. Locke in his last days 
bade his friends read the Psalms aloud, and it was whilst in rapt 
attention to their words that the stroke of death fell upon him. 
Lord Burleigh selected them out of the whole Bible as his special 
delight. They were the framework of the devotions and of the 
war-cries of Luther ; they were the last words that fell on the ear 
of his imperial enemy, Charles the Fifth. 

There are doubtless occasions when the Psalmist speaks as the 
organ of the nation. But he is for the most part alone with him- 
self and with God. Each word is charged with the intensity of 
some grief or joy known or unknown. The doctrines of David 


266 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


strike home and kindle a fire wherever they light, mainly be- 
cause they are sparks of the incandescence of a living human 
experience like our own. The patriarchs speak as the fathers of 
the chosen race; the prophets speak as its representatives and its 
guides. But the Psalmist speaks as the mouthpiece of the indi- 
vidual soul, of the free, independent, solitary conscience of man 
everywhere. Then there is the perfect naturalness of the Psalms. 
It appears, perhaps, most forcibly in their exultant freedom and 
joyousness of heart. The one Hebrew word which is their very 
pith and marrow is “ hallelujah.” They express, if we may so 
say, the sacred duty of being happy. Be happy, cheerful and 
thankful as ever we can, we cannot go beyond the Psalms. They 
laugh, they shout, they cry, they scream for joy. There is a wild 
exhilaration which rings through them. They exult alike in the 
joy of battle and in the calm of nature. They see God’s good- 
ness everywhere. They are not ashamed to confess it. The 
bright side of creation is everywhere uppermost ; the dark, senti- 
mental side is hardly ever seen. The fury of the thunder-storm, 
the roaring of the sea, are to them full of magnificence and de- 
light. Like the Scottish poet Sir Walter Scott, in his childhood, 
at each successive peal they clap their hands in innocent pleasure. 
The affection for birds and beasts and plants and sun and moon 
and stars is like that which Francis of Assisi claimed for all these 
fellow-creatures of God, as his brothers and sisters. There have 
been those for whom, on this very account, in moments of weak- 
ness and depression, the Psalms have been too much ; yet not the 
less is this vein of sacred merriment valuable in the universal 
mission of the chosen people ; and the more so because it grows 
out of another feeling in the Psalms, which has also jarred 
strangely on the minds of devout but narrow schools, “the free 
and princely heart of innocence” which to modern religion has 
often seemed to savor of self-righteousness and want of proper 
humility. The Psalmist’s bounding, buoyant hope — his fearless 
claim to be rewarded according to his righteous dealing — his 


DAVID. 


267 


confidence in his own integrity no lees than his agony over his 
own crimes — his passionate delight in the law, not as a cruel 
enemy, but as the best of guides, sweeter than honey and the 
honeycomb, — these are from a different point of the celestial com- 
pass from the Epistles to the Romans and Galatians. But they 
have not the less a truth of their own — a truth to nature, a truth 
to God — which the human heart will always recognize. The 
frank, unrestrained benediction on the upright, honest man, “the 
noblest work of God,” with which the Psalter opens, is but the 
fitting prelude to the boundless generosity and prodigality of joy 
with which at its close it calls on “ every creature that breathes,” 
without stint or exception, to “praise the Lord.” It may be 
that such expressions as these owe their first impulse in part to 
the new epoch of national prosperity and individual energy 
ushered in by David’s reign ; but they have swept the mind of 
the Jewish nation onward toward that mighty destiny which 
awaited it, and they have served, though at a retarded speed, to 
sweep on, ever since, the whole spirit of humanity in its upward 
course. “ The burning stream has flowed on after the furnace 
itself has cooled.” As of the classic writers of Greece it has been 
well said that they possess a charm quite independent of their 
genius, in the radiance of their brilliant and youthful beauty, so 
it may be said of the Psalms that they possess a like charm, in- 
dependent even of their depth of feeling or loftiness of d»>ctrine. 
In their free and generous grace the youthful, glorious David 
seems to live over again with a renewed vigor. “All our fresh 
springs” are in him and in his Psalter. 


DAVID’S LAMENT OVER ABSALOM. 

The pall was settled. He who slept beneath 
Was straightened for the grave; and as the folds 
Sunk to. the still proportions, they betrayed 
The matchless symmetry of Absalom. 

His hair was yet unshorn, and silken curls 


2G8 


GREAT MEN OR GOD. 


Were floating round the tassels as they swayed 
To the admitted air. 

His helm was at his feet ; his banner, soiled 
With trailing through Jerusalem, was laid 
Reversed beside him ; and the jeweled hilt, 

Whose diamonds lit the passage of his blade, 
Rested, like mockery, on his covered brow. 

The soldiers of the king trod to and fro, 

Clad in the garb of battle; and their chief, 

The mighty Joab, stood beside the bier, 

And gazed upon the dark pall steadfastly, 

As if he feared the slumberer might stir. 

A slow step startled him. He grasped his blade 
As if a trumpet rang; but the bent form 
Of David entered, and he gave command, 

In a low tone, to his few followers, 

And left him with his dead. The king stood still 
Till the last echo died; then throwing off 
The sackcloth from his brow, and laying back 
The pall from the still features of his child, 

He bowed his head upon him, and broke forth 
In the resistless eloquence of woe: 

‘'Alas! my noble boy! that thou shouldst die — 
Thou, who wert made so beautifully fair ! 

That death should settle in thy glorious eye, 

And leave his stillness in this clustering hair. 
How could he mark thee for the silent tomb, 

My proud boy Absalom! 

“ Cold i3 thy brow, my son ! and I am chill, 

As to my bosom I have tried to press thee, 

How was I wont to feel my pulses thrill, 

Like a rich harp-string, yearning to caress thee, 
And hear thy sweet l My father V from these dumb 
And cold lips, Absalom ! 

“The grave hath won thee. I shall hear the gush 
Of music, and the voices of the young ; 

And life will pass me in the mantling blush, 

And the dark tresses to the soft winds flung; 

But thou no more, with thy sweet voice, shalt come 
To meet me, Absalom ! 


DA VID. 


269 


“ And, oh, when I am stricken, and my heart, 

Like a bruised reed, is waiting to be broken, 

How will its love for thee, as I depart, 

Yearn for thine ear to drink its last deep token I 
It were so sweet, amid death’s gathering gloom, 

To see thee, Absalom ! 

“And now, farewell 1 ’tis hard to give thee up, 

With death so like a gentle slumber on thee. 

And thy dark sin! Oh, I could drink the cup, 

If from this woe its bitterness had won thee. 

May God have called thee, like a wanderer, home, 

My erring Absalom!” 

He covered up his face, and bowed himself 
A moment on his child; then giving him 
A look of melting tenderness, he clasped 
His hands convulsively, as if in prayer; 

And as a strength were given him from God, 

He rose up calmly, and composed the pall 
Firmly and decently, and left him there, 

As if his rest had been a breathing sleep. 

N. P. WlLLXS. 




XX. 

J O A B. 

)AB was the eldest and most remarkable of the three 
nephews of David, the children of Zeruiah, David’s 
sister. Their father is unknown. They all exhibit 
the activity and courage of David’s constitutional cha- 
racter, but they never rise beyond this to the nobler qualities 
which lift him above the wild soldiers and chieftains of the time. 
Asahel, who was cut off in his youth, and seems to have been the 
darling of the family, is only known to us from his gazelle-like 
agility. 2 Sam. ii. 18. Abishai and Joab are alike in their im- 
placable revenge. Joab, however, combines with these ruder 
qualities something of a more statesmanlike character, which 
brings him more nearly to a level with his youthful uncle, and 
unquestionably gives him the second place in the whole history 
of David’s reign. 

He first appears after David’s accession to the throne at Hebron, 
thus differing from his brother Abishai, who was already David’s 
companion during his wanderings. He with his two brothers 
went out from Hebron at the head of David’s “ servants” or 
guards, to keep a watch on the movements of Abner, who with a 
considerable force of Benjamites had crossed the Jordan and 
come as far as Gibeon, perhaps on a pilgrimage to the sanctuary. 
The two parties sat opposite each other, on each side of the bank 
by that city. Abner’s challenge, to which Joab assented, led to 
a desperate struggle between twelve champions from either side, 
270 



JOAB. 


271 


and the whole number fell from the mutual wounds they re- 
ceived. 

This roused the blood of the rival tribes ; a general encounter 
ensued ; Abner and his company were defeated, and in his flight 
being hard pressed by the swift-footed Asahel, he reluctantly 
killed the unfortunate youth. The expressions which he uses — 
“Wherefore should I smite thee to the ground? How then 
should I hold up my face to Joab thy brother?” — imply that up 
to this time there had been a kindly, if not a friendly, feeling 
between the two chiefs. It was rudely extinguished by this deed 
of blood. The other soldiers of Judah, when they came up to 
the dead body of their young leader, halted, struck dumb by 
grief. But his two brothers, on seeing the corpse, only hurried 
on with greater fury in the pursuit. At sunset the Benjamite 
force rallied round Abner, and he then made an appeal to the 
generosity of Joab not to push the war to extremities. Joab re- 
luctantly consented, drew off his troops, and returned to Hebron. 
They took the corpse of Asahel with them, and on the way halted 
at Bethlehem in the early morning, to inter it in their family 
burial-place. 

But Joab’s revenge on Abner was only postponed. He had 
been on another of these predatory excursions from Hebron, 
when he was informed on his return that Abner had in his ab- 
sence paid a visit to David and been received into favor. He 
broke out into a violent remonstrance with the king, and then, 
without David’s knowledge, immediately sent messengers after 
Abner, who was overtaken by them about two miles from He- 
bron. Abner, with the unsuspecting generosity of his noble 
nature, returned at once. Joab and Abishai met him in the 
gateway of the town; Joab took him aside, as if with a peaceful 
intention, and then struck him a deadly blow “ under the fifth 
rib.” It is possible that with the passion of vengeance for his 
brother may have been mingled the fear lest Abner should sup- 
plant him in the king’s favor. David burst into passionate 


272 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


invective and imprecations on Joab when lie heard of the act, 
and forced him to appear in sackcloth and torn garments at the 
funeral. But it was an intimation of Joab’s power which David 
never forgot. The awe in which he stood of the sons of Zeruiah 
cast a shade over the whole remainder of his life. 

There was now no rival left in the way of Joab’s advancement, 
and soon the opportunity occurred for his legitimate accession to 
the highest post that David could confer. At the siege of Jebus 
the king offered the office of chief of the army, now grown into a 
“ host,” to any one who would lead the forlorn hope and scale 
the precipice on which the besieged fortress stood. With an 
agility equal to that of David himself, or of his brother Asahel, 
Joab succeeded in the attempt, and became in consequence com- 
mander-in-chief — “ captain of the host” — the same office that 
Abner had held under Saul, the highest in the state after the 
king. His importance was immediately shown by his under- 
taking the fortification of the conquered city, in conjunction with 
David. 

In this post he was content, and served the king with un- 
deviating fidelity. In the wide range of wars which David 
undertook, Joab was the acting general, and he therefore may be 
considered as the founder, as far as military prowess was con- 
cerned — the Marlborough, the Belisarius — of the Jewish empire. 
Abishai, his brother, still accompanied him as captain of the 
king’s “ mighty men.” He had a chief armor-bearer of his 
own, and ten attendants to carry his equipment and baggage. 
He had the charge, formerly belonging to the king or judge, of 
giving the signal by trumpet for advance or retreat. He was 
called by the almost regal title of “lord,” “the prince of the 
king’s army.” His usual residence (except when campaigning) 
was in Jerusalem, but he had a house and property, with barley- 
fields adjoining, in the country, near an ancient sanctuary, called, 
from its nomadic village, “ Baal-hazor,” where there were exten- 
sive sheep-walks. His great war was that against Ammon, which 


JOAB. 


273 


he conducted in person and brought to a successful issue in three 
hard-fought campaigns. 

But the services of Joab to the king were not confined to these 
military achievements. In the entangled relations which grew 
up in David’s domestic life, he bore an important part. The first 
occasion was the unhappy correspondence which passed between 
him and the king during the Ammonite war respecting Uriah 
the Hittite, which led to the treacherous sacrifice of Uriah in a 
sortie. It shows both the confidence reposed by David in Joab 
and Joab’s too unscrupulous fidelity to David. From the pos- 
session which Joab thus acquired of the terrible secret of the royal 
household has been dated, with some probability, his increased 
power over the mind of the king. 

The next occasion on which it was displayed was in his suc- 
cessful endeavor to reinstate Absalom in David’s favor after the 
murder of Amnon. It would almost seem as if he had been 
guided by the effect produced upon the king by Nathan’s parable. 
A similar apologue he put into the mouth of a “ wise woman of 
Tekoah.” The exclamation of David on perceiving the applica- 
tion intimates the high opinion which he entertained of his 
general : "Is not the hand of Joab in all this?” A like indica- 
tion is found in the confidence of Absalom that Joab, who had 
thus procured his return, would also go a step farther and demand 
his admission to his father’s presence. Joab, who evidently 
thought that he had gained as much as could be expected, twice 
refused to visit the prince, but having been entrapped into an 
interview by a stratagem of Absalom, undertook the mission, and 
succeeded in this also. 

The same keen sense of his master’s interests that had prompted 
this desire to heal the breach in the royal family ruled the con- 
duct of Joab no less when the relations of the father and son were 
reversed by the successful revolt of Absalom. His former inti- 
macy with the prince did not impair his fidelity to the king. He 
followed him beyond the Jordan, and in the final battle of Eph- 
18 


274 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


raim assumed the responsibility of taking the rebel prince’s dan- 
gerous life in spite of David’s injunction to spare him, and when 
no one else had courage to act so decisive a part. He was well 
aware of the terrible effect it would have on the king, and on this 
account possibly dissuaded his young friend Ahimaaz from bear- 
ing the news; but when the tidings had been broken, he had the 
spirit himself to rouse David from the frantic grief which would 
have been fatal to the royal cause. His stern resolution (as he 
had himself anticipated) wellnigh proved fatal to his own in- 
terests. The king could not forgive it, and went so far in his 
unreasonable resentment as to transfer the command of the army 
from the too faithful Joab to his other nephew, Amasa, the son 
of Abigail, who had even sided with the insurgents. In like 
manner he returned only a reproachful answer to the vindictive 
loyalty of Joab’s brother, Abishai. Nothing brings out more 
strongly the good and bad qualities of Joab than his conduct in 
this trying crisis of his history. On the one hand, he remained 
still faithful to his master; on the other hand, as before in the 
case of Abner, he was determined not to lose the post he so highly 
valued. Amasa was commander-in-chief, but Joab had still his 
own small following of attendants, and with him were the mighty 
men commanded by his brother Abishai, and the body-guard of 
the king. With these he went out in pursuit of the remnants of 
the rebellion. In the heat of pursuit he encountered his rival 
Amasa, more leisurely engaged in the same quest. At “ the great 
stone” in Gibeon the cousins met. Joab’s sword was attached 
to his girdle; by design or accident it protruded from its sheath ; 
Amasa rushed into the treacherous embrace to which Joab in- 
vited him; the unsheathed sword in his left hand plunged into 
Amasa’s stomach ; a single blow from that practiced arm, as in 
the case of Abner, sufficed to do its work. Joab and his brother 
hurried on to discharge their commission, whilst one of his ten 
attendants stayed by the corpse, calling on the royal party to 
follow after Joab. But the deed produced a frightful impression. 


JOAB. 


275 


The dead body was lying in a pool of blood by the roadside; 
the pursuers halted, as they came up, at the ghastly sight, till the 
attendant dragged it out of the road and threw a cloak over it. 
Then, as if the spell was broken, they followed Joab, now once 
more captain of the host. He too, when they overtook him, 
presented an aspect long afterward remembered with horror. 
The blood of Amasa had spurted all over the girdle to which 
the sword was attached, and the sandals on his feet were red 
with the stains left by the falling corpse. But at the moment all 
were absorbed in the pursuit of the rebels. Once more a proof 
was given of the widespread confidence in Joab’s judgment. In 
the besieged town of Abel-Bethmaachah, far in the north, the 
same appeal was addressed to his sense of the evils of an endless 
civil war that had been addressed to him years before by Abner, 
near Gibeon. He demanded only the surrender of the rebel 
chief, and on the sight of his head thrown over the wall with- 
drew the army and returned to Jerusalem. 

His last remonstrance with David was on the announcement 
cf the king’s desire to number the people. “ The king pre- 
vailed against Joab.” But Joab’s scruples were so strong that 
he managed to avoid numbering two of the tribes — Levi and 
Benjamin. 

There is something mournful in the end of Joab. At the 
close of his long life, his loyalty, so long unshaken, at last 
wavered. “ Though he had not turned after Absalom, he turned 
after Adonijah.” This probably filled up the measure of the 
king’s long-cherished resentment. We learn from David’s last 
song that his powerlessness over his courtiers was even then 
present to his mind, and now on his deathbed he recalled to 
Solomon’s recollection the two murders of Abner and Amasa, 
with an injunction not to let the aged soldier escape with 
impunity. 

The revival of the pretensions of Adonijah after David’s death 
was sufficient to awaken the suspicions of Solomon. The king 


276 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


deposed the high priest Abiathar, Jcab’s friend and fellow-con- 
spirator, and the news of this event at once alarmed Joab him- 
self. He claimed the right of sanctuary within the curtains of 
the sacred tent, under the shelter of the altar at Gibeon. He 
was pursued by Benaiah, who at first hesitated to violate the 
sanctuary of the refuge ; but Solomon urged that the guilt of two 
such murders overrode all such protection. With his hands on 
the altar, therefore, the gray-headed warrior was slaughtered by 
his successor, the body was carried to his house “ in the wilder- 
ness” and there interred. He left descendants, but nothing is 
known of them. 





















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Nelson 8a Phillips .Publishers .Newark 








XXI. 

SOLOMON. 

AGNIFICENCE is the main quality of Israel’s “ grand 
monarque,” as Coleridge calls him. The frequent sub- 
limity and the fluctuating interest which surrounded 
his father’s career he possessed not. But the spring- 
tide of success which was his history, the abundance of his peace, 
his inexhaustible wealth, the pomp of his establishment, the 
splendor of the house and the temple which he built, the variety 
of his gifts and accomplishments, the richness and diversified 
character of his writings, and the manifold homage paid him by 
surrounding tribes and monarchs, — all proclaimed him “ every 
inch a king,” and have rendered “ Solomon and his glory” pro- 
verbial to this hour. He sat, too, in the centre of a widespread 
commerce, bringing in its yearly tribute of wealth to his treasury 
and of fame to his name. Even when he sinned, it was with a 
high hand, on a large scale and with a certain regal gusto ; he 
did not, like common sinners, sip at the cup of corruption, but 
drank of it u deep and large,” emptying it to the dregs. When 
satiety invaded his spirit, that too was of a colossal character, 
and for a season darkened all objects with the shade of “ vanity 
and vexation of spirit.” And when he suffered, his groans seemed 
those of a demigod in torment ; his head became waters, and his 
eyes fountains of tears. Thus, on all his sides, bright or black, he 
was equally and roundly great. Like a pyramid, the shadow he cast 
in one direction was as vast as the light he received on the other. 

277 




278 


GREA1 MEN OF GOD. 


No monarch in history can be compared, on the whole, with 
Solomon. From the Nebuchadnezzars, the Tamerlanes, and 
similar “thunderbolts of war,” he differs in kind as well as in 
degree. He was the peaceful temple; they were the armed 
towers: his wisdom was greater than his strength; they were 
sceptred barbarians, strong in their military prowess. In accom- 
plishments, and in the combination of good sense with genius, he 
reminds us of Julius Csesar; but he too was a man of war from 
his youth, besides being guilty of crimes, both against his country 
and his own person, blacker far than any recorded of the proverb- 
ialist of Israel — a union, let us rather call him, of some of the 
qualities of the “good Haroun Alraschid” with some of those of 
Alfred the Great. To the Oriental grandeur — the love of peace, 
poetry and pleasure which distinguished the caliph — he added the 
king’s sense of justice, and homely, practical wisdom. 

It was his first to prove to the world that peace has greater 
triumphs and richer glories than war. All the useful as well as 
elegant arts found in him at once a pattern and a patron. He 
collected the floating wisdom of his country, after having inter- 
mingled it with his own, into compact shape. He framed a rude 
and stuttering science, beautiful, doubtless, in its simplicity, when 
he “spake of all manner of trees,” from the cedar to the hyssop. 
He summoned into being the power of commerce, and its infant 
feats were mighty, and seemed, in that day, magical. He began 
to bind hostile countries together by the mild tie of barter — a 
lesson which might have been taught him, in the forest of Leba- 
non, by the interchange between the “gold clouds metropolitan” 
above and the soft valleys of Eden below. He built palaces of 
new and noble architecture; and although no pictures adorned 
the gates of the temple, or shone above the altar of incense, or 
met the eyes of the thousands who worshiped within the court of 
the Gentiles, yet was not that temple itself — with its roof of 
marble and gold, its flights of steps, its altars of steaming in- 
cense, its cherubic shapes, its bulls and molten sea — one picture, 


SOLOMON. 


279 


painted on the canvas of the city of Jerusalem, with the aid of 
the hand which had painted long before the gallery of the 
heavens? In poetry, too, he excelled, without being so filled 
and transported by its power as his father, and as with David, all 
his accomplishments and deeds were, during the greater part of 
his life, dedicated to and accepted by Heaven. 

Such is an outline of his efforts for the advancement of his 
country. Amid them all the feature which most exalts and most 
likens him to Jesus is the peace of his reign. It was this which 
entitled him to build the temple; it is this which casts a certain 
soft green light, like the light of the rainbow, around his glory; 
and it is this which directs every Christian eye instantly to a 
“ greater than Solomon,” in the promised peace and blessedness 
which the seventy-second Psalm predicts as the results of the 
reign of David’s son. The gorgeous Solomon and the humble 
Jesus wear one badge — the white rose of peace — the one above 
his crown of gold, and the other amid his crown of thorns. 

Every man has a dark period in his career, whether it is pub- 
licly known or concealed, whether the man outlive or sink before 
it. Solomon too had his “ hour and power of darkness.” Stern 
justice forbids us to wink at its principal cause. It was luxury 
aggravated into sin. Fullness of bread, security, splendor, 
wealth, like many suns shining at once upon his head, enfeebled 
and corrupted a noble nature. Amid the mazy dances of strange 
women he was whirled away into the embrace of demon gods. 
He polluted the simplicity of the service he had himself estab- 
lished. He rushed headlong into many a pit which he had him- 
self pointed out, till “ Wisdom” refused to be “justified” of this 
her chosen child. Sorrow trod faithfully and fast in his track of 
sin. Luxury begat listlessness, and this listlessness began soon 
to burn, a still slow fire, about his heart. His misery became 
wonderful, passing the woe of man ; the more as in the obscura- 
tion of his great light, enemies, like birds obscene and beasts of 
darkness, began to stir abroad. The general opinion of the 


280 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


Church, founded upon the Book of Ecclesiastes, is that he re- 
pented and forsook his sins before death. Be this true or not, 
the history of his fall is equally instructive. The pinnacle ever 
overhangs the precipice. Any great disproportion between gifts 
and graces renders the former fatal as a knife is to the suicide or 
handwriting to the forger. We ardently hope that Solomon be- 
came a true penitent. But though he had not, his writings, so 
far from losing their value, would gain new force; the figure of 
their fallen author would form a striking frontispiece, and their 
solemn warnings would receive an amen, as from the caves of 
perdition. A slain Solomon ! Since fell Lucifer, son of the 
morning, what more impressive proof of the power of evil ? 
And, like him, he would seem majestic though in “ ruins ” — not 
“less than archangel ruined, and the excess of glory obscured.” 
Alas ! is it not still often so in life? Do you not often see beings 
whom, for their powers, accomplishments or charms, you must 
almost worship, on whom the sun looks with fonder and more 
lingering ray, attracting, by their fatal beauty, the dark powers, 
and becoming monuments of folly or miracles of woe? Is there 
not w r hat we must, in our ignorance, call a mysterious envy in 
the universe, w r hich will not allow the beautiful to become the 
perfect, nor the strong the omnipotent, nor the lofty to reach the 
clouds ? That envy (if we dare use the word) is yet unspent ; 
and other mighty shades, hurled down into destruction, may be 
doomed to hear their elder brethren, from Lucifer to Byron, 
raising the thin shriek of gloomy salutation, “ Are ye also be- 
come weak as we?” as they follow them into their cheerless 
regions. 

With a bound of gladness we pass from the dark, uncertain 
close of Solomon’s life to his works and genius. In these he ex- 
hibits himself in three aspects — a poetical proverbialist, a poetical 
inquirer and a poetical lover; the first, in his Proverbs; the 
second, in the Book of Ecclesiastes ; and the third, in the Song 
of Songs. But in all three you see the true soul of a poet, under- 


SOLOMON. 


281 


standing poet in that high sense in which the greatest poet is the 
wisest man. 

David was essentially a lyrical, Solomon is a combination of 
the didactic and descriptive, poet. His pictures of folly and 
his praises of wisdom prove his didactic, many scenes in the 
Song, and, besides others, his picture of old age in Ecclesiastes, 
his descriptive, powers. His lire, compared with David’s, is calm 
and glowing — a guarded furnace, not a flame tossed by the wind ; 
his flights are fewer, but they are as lofty, and more sustained. 
With less fire, he has more figure; the colors of his style are 
often rich as the humming-bird’s wing, and proclaim at once 
a later age and a more voluptuous fancy. The father has written 
hymns which storm the feelings, melt the heart, rouse the devo- 
tion, of multitudes ; the son has painted still rich pictures which 
touch the imagination of the solitary and the thoughtful. The 
one, though a great, can hardly be called a wise, poet; the other 
was the poet-sage of Israel — his imagination and intellect were 
equal, and they interpenetrated. 

The Proverbs appear to have been collected by him, with many 
important additions, into their present form. A few others w T ere 
annexed afterward. They now lie before us, a massive collection 
of sententious truths, around which Solomon has hung illustra- 
tions, consisting of moral paintings and of meditative flights. 

We have first the material, or Proverbs proper. A proverb 
may perhaps be best defined as a common-sense truth condensed in 
a sentence and sealed or starred with an image. It was certainly 
a fine conception, that of curdling up the common sense of man- 
kind into pleasing and portable form — of driving the flocks of 
loose, wandering thoughts from the wide common into the pen- 
folds of proverbs. Proverbs have been compared to the flights 
of oracular birds. They tell great general truths. They show 
the same principles and passions to have operated in every age, 
and prove thus the unity of man. They engrave, unintention- 
ally, ancient manners and customs, and serve as medals as well 


282 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


as maxims. Like fables, they convey truth to the young with all 
the freshness and the force of fiction. In the comparative rich- 
ness or meagreness of a nation’s proverbs may be read much of 
its intellect and character; indeed, Fletcher’s saying about the 
songs of a country may be transferred to its proverbs — they are 
better than its laws ; nay, they are its laws — not the less power- 
ful that they are not confined to statute-books, but wander from 
tongue to tongue and hearth to hearth. The Proverbs proper, in 
Solomon’s collection, are not only rich in truth, but exceedingly 
characteristic of the Jewish people and of those early ages. The 
high tendencies of the Hebrew mind — its gravity, its austerity, 
its constant recognition of justice as done now , its identification of 
evil with error (“ Do not they err that devise evil ?”), of crime 
with folly, and the perpetual up-rushing reference to Deity as a 
near presence — are nowhere more conspicuous than here. The 
truth inscribed in them is rarely abstract or transcendental ; 
towering up to God, on the one hand, in the shape of worship, it 
is always seeking entrance into man, on the other, in the form of 
practice. Yet profound as wisdom itself are many of its sen- 
tences. “ Man’s goings are of the Lord ; how can a man then 
understand his own way ?” “ Stolen waters are sweet, and bread 

eaten in secret is pleasant.” “ The spirit of man is the candle of 
the Lord.” “ The righteous wisely considereth the house of the 
wicked.” “A merry heart doeth good like medicine; but a 
broken spirit drieth the bones.” “The desire of the slothful 
killeth him.” “ Open rebuke is better than secret love.” Let 
those who are in the habit of regarding the Proverbs as a mass 
of truisms, ponder such and many similar sentences. We find 
all that is valuable in Emerson’s famous essays on “ Compensa- 
tion” and “ Spiritual Laws” contained in two or three of those 
old abrupt sentences which had perhaps floated down from before 
the flood. The imagery in which they are enshrined has a homely, 
quaint richness, and adds an antique setting to these “ ancient, 
most domestic ornaments.” 


SOLOMON. 


283 


Around such strong simplicities, rescued from the wreck of 
ages, the genius of Solomon has suspended certain pictures and 
meditations indubitably all his own. Not only do they stand 
out from and above the rest of the book, not only are they too 
lengthy to have been preserved by tradition, but they bear the 
mark of his munificent and gorgeous mind. Some of them are 
moral sketches, such as those of the simple youth, in the seventh 
chapter ; of the strange woman, in the ninth ; of the drunkard 
and glutton, in the twenty-third ; and of the virtuous woman, in 
the twenty-first — sketches reminding you, in their fullness, 
strength and fidelity, of the masterpieces of Hogarth, who had 
them avowedly in his eye; others are pictures of natural objects, 
looking in amid his moralizings as sweetly and refreshingly as 
roses at the open window of a summer schoolroom. Such we 
find at the close of the twenty-seventh chapter: “Be thou dili- 
gent to know the state of thy flocks, and look well to thy herds. 
The hay appeareth, and the tender grass showeth itself, and herbs 
of the mountains are gathered ; the lambs are for thy clothing, 
and the goats are the price (or rent) of the field. And thou shalt 
have goats’ milk enough for thy food, for the food of thy house- 
hold, and for the maintenance for thy maidens.” A third class 
consists of poetic peans in praise of wisdom, and solemn appeals 
to those who reject its counsel and will none of its reproof. The 
most plaintive of these occurs in the first chapter of the book, 
and forms a striking motto upon its opening portals. Scripture 
contains no words more impressive than Wisdom’s warning: 
“ Because I called, and ye refused ; therefore I will laugh at your 
calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh; when your de- 
struction cometh as a whirlwind.” The laughter of a God is a 
tremendous conception. Suppose the lightning a ghastly smile, 
and the after-thunder a peal of laughter from the sky at poor, 
cowering man ; what a new horror would this add to the tragedy 
of the storm ! and yet it were but a hieroglyphic of the irony im- 
plied in divine derision. While the giants were preparing, with 


284 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


labor dire and din far heard, to storm the skies, the “gods,” says 
Paracelsus, “ were calm, and Jove prepared his thunder — all old 
tales.” But in the hearing of the Hebrew poet, while the kings 
of the earth are plotting against the Lord and his anointed, a 
laugh, instead of thunder, shakes the heavens, makes the earth 
to tremble, and explodes in a moment the long-laid designs of 
the enemy. 

The praise and personification of wisdom reach Solomon’s 
highest pitch. To personify an attribute well is a great achieve- 
ment; to sustain “ strength” or “ force” or “ beauty ” through a 
simile or an apostrophe is not easy, much less to supply a long 
soliloquy for the lips of eternal Wisdom. Macaulay has coupled 
Bunyan and Shelley together as masters in the power of glorify- 
ing abstractions — of painting spiritual conceptions in the colors 
of life ; nay, spoken of them as if they had been the first and 
greatest in the art. He has forgotten JEschylus and those strong 
life-like forms who aid in binding Prometheus to his rock. He 
has forgotten Solomon’s Wisdom, who stands up an “ equal 
among mightiest energies,” and speaks in tones so similar to, 
that he has often been supposed one of, the Great Three: 
“When he prepared the heavens, 1 was there; when he ap- 
pointed the foundations of the earth, I was by him, and I was 
daily his delight : I was set up from everlasting.” 

We have mentioned the author of the Pilgrim’s Progress. 
Interesting in itself, that work is so also as one of a class of 
writings of which Ecclesiastes was the first. We refer to 
spiritual autobiographies. We sigh and cry in vain for an 
authentic account of the inner life of Shakespeare or Bacon or 
Burke; but we have that (according to general belief) of Solo- 
mony that of Bunyan, and that of a modern who chooses to en- 
title himself “ Sartor Resartus.” It were curious, and perhaps 
something better than curious, to review these three earnest his- 
tories together. Now, what first strikes us about them is their 
great similarity. Three powerful minds, at the distance of ages, 


SOLOMON. 


285 


; n the most diverse ranks, circumstances and states of society, are 
found, in different dialects, asking the question, “ What shall I 
Jo to be saved ?” struggling in different bogs of the same “ Slough 
of Despond,” trying many expedients to be rid of their burdens, 
and at length finding, or fancying they have found, a final remedy. 
It is, then, the mark of man to wear a burden ; it is the mark of 
the highest men to bear the heaviest burdens ; and it is the mark 
of the brave and bravest men to struggle most to be free from 
them. The sun of the civilization of the nineteenth century only 
shows the burden in a broader light, and makes the struggle 
against it more conspicuous and perhaps more terrible. The 
preacher from the throne and the preacher from the tub utter the 
same message ; in all, the struggle seems made in good faith — all 
are in earnest, all have surrounded their researches with a poetic 
beauty only inferior to their personal interest, and all seem to 
typify large classes of cognate minds. 

Their difficulties, however, assume diversity of form and elimi- 
nate diversities of feeling. Solomon’s weariness is not altogether, 
though it is in part, that of the jaded sensualist ; its root lies 
deeper. It is the contrast between the grandeur of the human 
mind and the shortness of human life, the meanness of earthly 
things and the frailty of the human frame, that amazes and per- 
plexes him. The thought of such a being, surrounded by such 
circumstances, inhabiting such a house and dismissed only into 
the gulf of death, haunts his mind like a spectre. That spectre 
lie in vain seeks to reason away — to drown, to dissipate or to 
moralize away — to outstare with a hardy look, to bring under 
any theory, to find any path of life where it is not; still it rises 
before him, embittering his food, shadowing his wine-cup, making 
business a drudgery, the reading or making of books a weariness, 
and pleasure a refined torment. Wild at times with uncertainty ^ 
he spurns at the very distinctions between right and wrong, 
knowledge and ignorance, and prays to “ God to manifest to the 
sons of men that they are but beasts n (what a text for Swift ! 


286 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


nay, are not all his works really sermons on it?); but, with the 
spectre reflected on them , these great barriers arise again, and he 
confesseth that “ wisdom excelleth folly, as far as light excelleth 
darkness.” Death, being to him but faintly gilded with im- 
mortality, presents little prospect of relief. And thus does the 
wise, wealthy and gifted king toss to and fro on his couch of 
golden fire, and the Book of Ecclesiastes is simply a record of the 
uneasy motions and helpless cries of a mind as vacant as vast, 
seeking to be filled, and awakening an echo only of the horse- 
leech’s cry, “ Give, give !” 

In Bunyan the difficulty is rather moral than intellectual. 
His spirit is bowed under a sense of sin and of its infinite, end- 
less consequences. He is humble, as if all hell were bound up 
in the burden on his back. “How shall I be happy on earth?” 
is Solomon’s question ; “ How shall I cease to be unhappy here 
and hereafter ?” is Bunyan’s. Both feel themselves miserable, but 
to Bunyan’s mind his misery seems more the result of personal 
guilt than of the necessary limitations of human life and of the 
human understanding. 

In Sartor we have great doubt and darkness expressed in the 
language of the present day. But it is not so much his personal 
imperfection, or the contrast between the capacities of his soul 
and the vanity and shortness of his life, which affects him, as it 
is the uncertainty of his religious creed. Devoured by the re- 
ligious element as by central fire, the faith of his fathers supplies, 
he thinks, no adequate fuel. Unable to believe it fully, he is 
incapable of hating or of striking at its roots; he deems that 
rottenness has withered it; but is it not still the old elm tree 
under which, in childhood, he sported, mused and prayed ? No 
other shelter or sanctuary can he find. And then, in wild, fierce, 
yet self-collected wanderings, “ Gehenna buckled under his calm 
belt,” he walks astray over the wilderness of this world, seeking, 
above all things, after rest, or that he should awake and find his 
pilgrimage, indeed, to be a dream. 


SOLOMON. 


287 


Thus pass on the three notable pilgrims — the crowned Solo- 
mon, the bush-lipped and fiery-eyed Baptist, and the strong 
literary Titan of this age — each, for a season, carrying his hand, 
like the victims in Yathek, upon his breast, and saying, “ I 
burns.” All attain at last a certain peace and satisfaction. The 
conclusion of Solomon’s whole matter is, “ Fear God, and keep 
his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.” “ Here 
is one solid spot amid an ocean of vexation, of uncertainty, of 
contradiction and of vanity, and on it I will rest my weary foot.” 
Bunyan, a poor burdened sinner, clings to the cross, and it is 
straightway surrounded by the shining ones, who come from 
heaven to heal and comfort the sufferer. Sartor says, te I am not 
meant for pleasure — I despise it; happiness is not meant for me 
nor for man, but I may be blessed in my misery and darkness, 
and this is far better.” All these results seem beautiful in the 
light of the tears and the tortures through which they have been 
reached. All are sincere and strong-felt. But while the last is 
vague and unsupported as a wandering leaf, while the first is im- 
perfect as the age in which it was uttered, the second is secure in 
its humility, strong in its weakness, has ministered and is minis- 
tering comfort, peace and hope — how living and life-giving to 
thousands ! — and if it fail, 

“The pillared firmament is rottenness, 

And earth’s base built on stubble.” 

AVe leave the machinery, the meaning and the manners of 
Solomon’s Song to Charles Taylor, Pye Smith and other critics; 
we have a sentence to say as to its spirit and poetry. It is 
conceived throughout in a vein of soft and tender feeling, and 
suffused with a rich, slumberous light, like that of an afternoon in 
June, trembling amid beds of roses. There are flowers, but they 
are not stirred, but fanned, by the winds of passion. The winds 
of passion themselves are asleep to their own music; the figures 
of speech are love-sick ; the dialogues seem carried on in whispers. 


288 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


Over all the scenery — from the orchards of pomegranates, the trees 
of frankincense and the fountains of the gardens, to the lions’ 
dens and the mountains of the leopards — there rests a languoi 
like sunny mist, and shines “the bloom of young desire, and 
purple light of love.” To call all this the effect of an Oriental 
climate and genius is incorrect; for, first, all the writings in 
Scripture were by Orientals ; and secondly, we find certain Occi- 
dental poems, such as “Romeo and Juliet” or “Lalla Rookh,” 
nearly as rich as the Song. We must either trace it to some 
sudden impulse given to the imagination of Solomon, whether by 
spring coming before her time, or appearing in more than her 
wonted beauty, or flushing over the earth with more than her 
wonted spirit-like speed, or by the access of a new passion which, 
even in advanced life, makes all things, from the winter in the 
blood to the face of nature, new and fresh, as if after a shower 
of sunny rain : or we may trace it, with the general voice of the 
Church, to the influence of new views of the loveliness of Mes- 
siah’s character and of his future Church, around whom, as if 
hastily to pay the first-fruits of the earth’s homage to her Lord 
and his bride, cluster in here all natural beauties, at once reflect- 
ing their image and multiplying their splendors. Solomon might 
have had in his eye a similar vision to that afterward seen bv 
John of the bride, the Lamb’s wife, coming down from God out 
of heaven; and surely John himself never described his vision 
under sweeter, although he has with sublimer, images : “ I am 
the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys. As the lily among 
thorns, so is my love among the daughters.” “ Who is she that 
looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, 
and terrible as an army with banners?” 

We notice in this poem two classes of descriptions — the one 
of persons, the other of natural scenes — and a singular contrast 
between them. Solomon’s description of persons is, in general, 
gorgeous in exuberance. Images from artificial and from natural 
objects are collected, till the bride or bridegroom is decked with 


SOLOMON. 


289 


as many ornaments as a summer’s landscape or a winter’s night 
sky; the raven’s plumage is plucked from his wing; the dove’s 
eye is extracted from its socket ; perfumes are brought from beds 
of spices, and lilies led drooping out of their low valleys ; nay, 
the vast Lebanon is himself ransacked to garnish and glorify the 
one dear image. On the other hand, the description of natural 
scenes is simple in the extreme, yet beautiful as if Nature were 
describing herself: “The winter is past, the rain is over and 
gone ; the flowers appear on the earth ; the time of the singing 
of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.” 
This is the green of nature looking in amid the glare of passion. 
We have here love first exaggerating the object beloved, and 
then retiring to hide her blushes of shame amid the cool leaves 
of the garden. 

We find in Shakespeare a similar intermixture of natural ob- 
jects with passionate scenes, and a similar subdued tone in their 
description. It is not that he does this for the sake of effect, nor 
that he quails — he merely cools — before nature. The natural 
allusions act like the touch of female affection laid on the red 
brow of passion and opening the fountain of tears. His mad- 
men, like poor Lear, are crowned with flowers; his castles of 
gloom and murder are skimmed by swallows and swaddled 
in delicate air; in his loneliest ruins lurk wild grasses and 
flowers, and around them the lightning itself becomes a crown 
of glory. 

Regarding the question as to the Christian application of the 
Song, as still a moot and as a non-essential point, we forbear to 
express an opinion on it. As a love dialogue, colored to the 
proper degree with a sensuous flush, “beautiful exceedingly” in 
its poetry, and portraying with elegance ancient customs and the 
inextinguishable principles of the human heart, this poem is set 
unalterably in its own niche. It has had many commentaries, 
but, in our judgment, the only writer who has caught its warm 
and glowing spirit is Samuel Rutherford, who has not, indeed, 
19 


290 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


written a commentary upon it, but whose Letters are inspired by 
its influence and have nearly reproduced all its language. Despite 
the extravagances with which they abound, when we consider 
the heavenliness of their spirit, the richness of their fancy, the 
daring yet devout tone of their language, the wrestling earnest- 
ness of their exercise, their aspirings after the Saviour, in whom 
the writer’s soul often sees “ seven heavens,” and to gain whom 
he would burst through “ ten hells,” — we say, u Blessings and 
perfumes on the memory of those dungeons whence so many of 
these letters came, and on that of their rapt, seraphic author, 
whose chains have been glorious liberty to many a son of 
God !” The soul was strong which could spring heaven-high 
under his prison load, and which has made the cells of his sup- 
posed infamy holy and haunted ground both to the lovers of 
liberty and the worshipers of God. 

It is with a certain melancholy that we dismiss the great 
monarch of Israel. We remember once feeling a strong shudder 
of horror at hearing an insinuation (we believe not true) that the 
author of a very popular and awful religious poem was not him- 
self a pious man. It was one of those assertions which make 
the heart quake and the hand catch convulsively at the nearest 
object, as if the earth were sinking below us. But the thought 
of the writer of a portion of the Bible being a “ castaway ” — a 
thought entertained by some of repute in the Christian world — 
is far more painful. It may not, as we have seen, detract from, 
but rather add to, the effect of his writings, but does it not sur- 
round them with a black margin ? Does not every sentence of 
solemn wisdom they contain seem clothed in mourning for the 
fate of its parent? On Solomon’s fate we dare pronounce no 
judgment ; but even granting his final happiness, it is no 
pleasing task to record the mistakes, the sins, the sorrows or 
even the repentance of a being originally so noble. If at 
“ evening-time it was light” with him, yet did not a scorch- 
ing splendor torment the noon, and did not thunders, melting 


SOLOMON. 


291 


into heavy showers, obscure the after-day? The “ glory of 
Solomon” is a fearful and troubled glory; how different from 
the meek light of the life of Isaac — most blameless of patri- 
archs — whose history is that of a quiet, gray autumnal day 
where, with no sun visible, all above and below seems diluted 
sunshine — a day as dear as it is beautiful, and which dies re- 
gretted as it has lived enjoyed ! 




XXII. 

ELIJAH. 

HAB is the first of the kings of Israel who appears to 
have practiced polygamy. But over his harem pre- 
sided a queen who has thrown all her lesser rivals into 
the shade. For the first time the chief wife of an Is- 
raelite king was one of the old accursed Canaanite race. A new 
dynasty now sat on the Tyrian throne founded by Eth-baal. He 
had, according to the Phoenician records, gained the crown by 
murder of his brother, and he united to the royal dignity his 
former office of high priest of Ashtaroth. The daughter of Eth- 
baal was Jezebel, a name of dreadful import to Israelitish ears, 
though in later ages it has reappeared under the innocent form 
of Isabella. 

The marriage of Ahab with this princess was one of those 
turning-points in the history of families where a new influence 
runs like poison through all its branches and transforms it into 
another being. Jezebel was a woman in whom, with the reck- 
less and licentious habits of an Oriental queen, were united the 
fiercest and sternest qualities inherent in the old Semitic race. 
Her husband, in whom generous and gentle feelings were not 
wanting, was yet of a weak and yielding character, which soon 
made him a tool in her hands. Even after his death, through 
the reigns of his sons, her presiding spirit was the evil genius 
of the dynasty. Through her daughter Athaliah — a daughter 
worthy of the mother — her influence extended to the rival king- 



ELIJAH. 


293 


dom. The wild license of her life and the magical fascination of 
her arts or her character became a proverb in the nation. Round 
her and from her, in different degrees of nearness, is evolved the 
awful drama of the most eventful crisis of this portion of the 
Israelite history. 

The first indication of her influence was the establishment of 
the Phoenician worship on a grand scale in the court of Ahab. 
To some extent this was the natural consequence of the deprava- 
tion of the public worship of Jehovah by Jeroboam, which seems 
under Omri to have taken a more directly idolatrous turn. But 
still the change from a symbolical worship of the one true God, 
with the innocent rites of sacrifice and prayer, to the cruel and 
licentious worship of the Phoenician divinities, was a prodigious 
step downward, and left traces in Northern Palestine which no 
subsequent reformations were able entirely to obliterate. Two 
sanctuaries were established — one for each of the great Phoenician 
deities — at eaoh of the two new capitals of the kingdom. The 
sanctuary of Ashtarotk, with its accustomed grove, was under 
Jezebel’s special sanction, at the palace of Jezreel. Four hun- 
dred priests or prophets ministered to it, and were supported at 
her table. A still more remarkable sanctuary was dedicated to 
Baal on the hill of Samaria. It was of a size sufficient to con- 
tain all the worshipers of Baal that the northern kingdom could 
furnish. Four hundred and fifty prophets frequented it. In the 
interior was a kind of inner fastness or adytum, in which were 
seated or raised on pillars the figures carved in wood of the 
Phoenician deities as they were seen in vision, centuries later, by 
Jezebel’s fellow-countryman, Hannibal, in the sanctuary of Gades. 
In the centre was Baal, the sun-god; around him were the in- 
ferior divinities. In front of the temple stood on a stone pillar 
the figure of Baal alone. 

As far as this point of the history the effect of the heathen 
worship was not greater than it had been at Jerusalem. But 
there soon appeared to be a more energetic spirit at work than 


294 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


had ever come forth from the palace of Solomon or Kehoboam. 
Now arose the first of a long series of like events in ecclesiastical 
history — the first great persecution — the first persecution on a 
large scale which the Church has witnessed in any shape. The 
extermination of the Canaanites, however bloody and unlike the 
spirit of Christian times, had yet been in the heat of war and 
victory. Those who remained in the land were unmolested in 
their religious worship, as they were in their tenure of property 
and of office. It was reserved for the heathen Jezebel to exem- 
plify the principle of persecution in its most direct form. To 
her, and not to Moses or Joshua, the bitter intolerance of modern 
times must look back as its legitimate ancestress. 

The first beginnings of the persecution are not recorded. A 
chasm occurs in the sacred narrative which must have contained 
the story, only known to us through subsequent allusions — how 
the persecutors passed from hill to hill, destroying the many 
altars which rose, as in the south, so in the north, of Palestine, to 
the one true God — how the prophets who had hitherto held their 
own in peril were hunted down as the chief enemies of the new 
religion. Now began those hidings in caves and dens of the 
earth — the numerous caverns of the limestone rocks of Palestine 
— the precursors of the history of the Catacombs and the Cove- 
nanters. A hundred fugitives might have been seen, broken up 
into two companies, guided by the friendly hand of the chief 
minister of Ahab’s court — the Sebastian of this Jewish Dio- 
cletian — and hid in spacious caverns, probably among the clefts 
of Carmel. 

It might have seemed as if, in the kingdom of Israel, the last 
remnant of the true religion were to perish. But the blessing 
which had been pronounced on the new kingdom was still 
mightier than its accompanying curse. Besides, to many faith- 
ful ones, the neighboring kingdom of Judah became a refuge. 

It was at this crisis that there appeared the very chief of the 
prophets. “ Alone, alone, alone ” — so thrice over is the word 


ELIJAH. 


295 


emphatically repeated — the loftiest, sternest spirit of the true 
faith raised up face to face with the proudest and fiercest spirit 
of the old Asiatic paganism — against Jezebel rose up Elijah the 
Tishbite. 

He stood alone against Jezebel. He stands alone in many 
senses among the prophets. Nursed in the bosom of Israel, the 
prophetical portion — if one may so say — of the chosen people, 
vindicating the true religion from the nearest danger of over- 
throw, setting at defiance by invisible power the whole forces of 
the Israelite kingdom, he reached a height equal to that of Moses 
and Samuel in the traditions of his country. He was the prophet 
for whose return in later years his countrymen have looked with 
most eager hope. 

He appears to have given the whole order a new impulse, both 
in form and spirit, such as it had not had since the death of 
Samuel.* Then they were “ companies, bands of prophets;” now 
they are “ sons, children of the prophets ;” and Elijah first, and 
Elisha afterward, appeared as the “ Father,” the “ Abbot,” the 
“ Father in God,” of the whole community. His mission was, 
however, not to be the revealer of a new truth, but the champion 
of the old forgotten law. He was not so much a prophetic 
teacher as the precursor of prophetic teachers. As his likeness 
in the Christian era came to prepare the way for One greater 
than himself, so Elijah came to prepare the way for the close 
succession of prophets who, for the next hundred years, sustained 
both Israel and Judah by hopes and promises before unknown. 
As of Luther, so of Elijah, it may be said that he was a reformer 
and not a theologian. He wrote, he predicted, he taught, almost 
nothing. He is to be valued not for what he said, but for what 
he did ; not because he created, but because he destroyed. 

For this his especial mission his life and appearance especially 
qualified him. Of all the prophets he is the one who is most 
removed from modern times, from Christian civilization. There 
is a wildness, an isolation, a roughness about him, contrasting 


296 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


forcibly even with the mild beneficence of his immediate suc- 
cessor, Elisha, still more with the bright serenity of Isaiah and 
the plaintive tenderness of Jeremiah, but most of all with the 
patience and loving-kindness of the gospel. Round his picture 
in the churches of Eastern Christians at the present day are 
placed, by a natural association, the decapitated heads of their 
enemies. Abdallah Pasha, the fierce lord of Acre, almost died 
of terror from a vision in which he believed himself to have seen 
Elijah sitting on the top of Carmel. It is the likeness of his 
stern seclusion which is reproduced in John the Baptist, and 
which in him is always contrasted with the character of Christ. 

The other prophets — Moses, Samuel, Elisha, Isaiah — were 
constantly before the eyes of their countrymen. But Elijah they 
saw only by partial and momentary glimpses. He belonged to 
no special place. The very name of* his birthplace is disputed. 
“There was no nation or kingdom” to which Ahab had not sent 
to find him, “but behold, they found him not.” As soon as he 
was seen, “the breath of the Lord carried him away, whither 
they knew not.” He was as if constantly in the hand of God. 
“As the Lord liveth, before whom I stand,” was his habitual 
expression — a slave constantly waiting to do his master’s bidding. 
For an instant he was seen here and there at spots far apart — 
sometimes in the ravine of the Cherith in the Jordan valley, 
sometimes in the forests of Carmel; now on the seashore of 
Zidon, at Zarephath ; now in the wilderness of Horeb, in the 
distant south ; then far off on his way to the northern Damascus; 
then on the top of some lonely height on the way to Ekron ; 
then snatched away “on some mountain or some valley” in the 
desert of Jordan. He was in his lifetime what he is still in the 
traditions of the Eastern Church — the prophet of the mountains. 

Whatever might be the exact spot of his birth, he was of “ the 
inhabitants of Gilead.” He was the greatest representative of 
the tribes from beyond the Jordan. Their wild and secluded 
character is his no less. Wandering, as we have seen, over the 


ELIJAH . 


297 


lulls of Palestine, with no rest or fixed habitation — fleet as the 
wind when the hand of the Lord was upon him and he ran be- 
fore the chariot of Ahab from Carmel to Jezreel — he was like the 
neroes of his own tribe of Gad, in David’s life, who swam the 
Jordin in flood-time, “ whose face were as the faces of lions, and 
whose feet were swift as the roes upon the mountains;” like the 
Bedouins from the same region at the present day, who run with 
unwearied feet by the side of the traveler’s camel, and whose 
strange forms are seen for a moment behind rock and tree, in 
city or field, and then vanish again into their native wilderness. 
And such as they are, such was he also in his outward appear- 
ance. Long shaggy hair flowed over his back, and a large rough 
mantle of sheepskin, fastened around his loins by a girdle of hide, 
was his only covering. This mantle, the special token of his 
power, at times he would strip off and roll up like a staff in his 
hand, at other times wrap his face in it. These characteristics 
of the Arab life were dignified but not destroyed by his high 
prophetic mission, and were clearly brought out in the outstand- 
ing events of his career. 

The story of Elijah, like the story of Athanasius, is full of 
sudden reverses. The prophets of Baal were destroyed ; Ahab 
was cowed. But the ruling spirit of the hierarchy and of the 
kingdom remained undaunted ; Jezebel was not dismayed. With 
one of those tremendous vows , which mark the history of the 
Semitic race, both within and without the Jewish pale — the vow 
of Jephthah, the vow of Saul, the vow of Hannibal — she sent a 
messenger to Elijah, saying, “As surely as ‘thou art Elijah, and 
I am Jezebel, so may God do to me, and more also, if I make 
not thy life to-morrow, about this time, as the life of one of 
them.” 

The prophet who had confronted Ahab and the national as- 
sembly trembled before the implacable queen. It was the crisis 
of his life. One only out of vast multitudes remained faithful to 
him — the Zidonian boy of Zarephath — as Jewish tradition be- 


298 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


lieved, the future Jonah. "With this child as his sole companion, 
he left the borders of Israel and entered — as far as we know, for 
the first and only time — the frontier of the rival kingdom. But 
he halted not there. Only an apocryphal tradition points out 
the mark of his sleeping form, on a rock halfway between Jeru- 
salem and Bethlehem. He reached the limit of the Holy Land. 
At Beersheba he left his attendant youth, and thence plunged 
into the desert. Under a solitary flowering broom of the desert 
he lay down to die : “ It is enough ; now, O Jehovah, take away 
my life ; for I am not better than my fathers.” It is the despond- 
ing cry of many a gallant spirit in the day of disappointment and 
desertion. But, once and again, an unknown messenger or an 
angelic visitant gave him sustenance and comfort, and “ in the 
strength of that meat he went forty days and forty nights” across 
the platform of the Sinaitic desert, till he came “ to the mount 
of God, to Horeb.” It is the only time since the days of Moses 
that the course of the sacred history brings us back to these 
sacred solitudes. Of pilgrims, if any there were, to those early 
haunts of Israel, Elijah’s name alone has come down to us. In 
“the cave” — so it is called, whether from its being the usual re- 
sort, or from the fame of this single visit — in the cave, well 
known then, though uncertain now, Elijah passed the night. 
There is nothing to confirm, but there is nothing to contradict, 
the belief that it may have been in that secluded basin which has 
been long pointed out as the spot, beneath the summit of what is 
called the “ Mount of Moses.” One tall cypress stands in the 
centre of the little upland plain. A ruined chapel covers the 
rock on which the prophet is believed to have rested, on the slope 
of the hill. A well and tank, ascribed to him, are on the other 
side of the basin. The granite rocks enclose it on every side, as 
though it were a natural sanctuary. No scene could be more 
suitable for the vision which follows. Elijah here received the 
most marked manifestation of the divine presence with which 
he was, so far as we know, ever favored. It was a marked 


ELIJAH. 


299 


crisis, not only in his life, but in the history of the whole pro- 
phetic dispensation. 

He is drawn out by the warning, like that which came to 
Moses on the same spot, and stands on the mountain-side, ex- 
pecting the signs of the divine presence. He listened, and there 
came the sound of a rushing hurricane, which burst through the 
mountain-wall and rolled down the granite rocks in massive 
fragments around him, “but Jehovah was not in the wind.” 
He stood firm on his feet, expecting it again, and under his feet 
the solid mountain shook with the shock of a mighty earthquake, 
“ but Jehovah was not in the earthquake.” He looked out on 
the hills as they rose before him in the darkness of the night, 
and they flamed with flashes of fire, as in the days of Moses, 
“ but Jehovah was not in the fire.” And then .in the deep still- 
ness of the desert air, unbroken by falling stream or note of bird 
or tramp of beast or cry of man, came the whisper of a voice as 
of a gentle breath — of a voice so small that it was almost like 
silence. Then he knew that the moment was come. He drew, 
as was his wont, his rough mantle over his head ; he wrapped his 
face in its ample folds ; he came out from the sheltering rock and 
stood beneath the cave to receive the divine communications. 

They blended with the vision ; one cannot be understood with- 
out the other. They both alike contain the special message to 
Elijah and the universal message to the universal Church. Each 
is marked and explained by the divine question and the human 
answer, twice repeated : “ What doest thou here, Elijah : thou, 
the prophet of Israel, here in the deserts of Arabia?” “I have 
been very jealous for Jehovah, the God of hosts : because the 
children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine 
altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword ; and I, even I 
only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.” He 
thinks that the best boon that he can ask is that his life should 
be taken away. It is a failure, a mistake ; he is not better than 
his fathers. Such is the complaint of Elijah, which carries with 


300 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


it the complaint of many a devout heart and gifted mind when 
the world has turned against them, when their words and deeds 
have been misinterpreted, when they have struggled in vain 
against the wickedness, the folly, the stupidity of mankind. 
But the answer to them is contained in the blessing on inde- 
pendence. It is the blessing on Athanasius against the world ; 
it is the encouragement to the angel Abdiel : “ Amongst the 
faithless, faithful only he.” Resistance to evil, even in the 
desert solitude, is a new starting-point of life. He has still a 
task before him : “ Go, return on thy way to the wilderness of 
Damascus.” He is to go on through good report and evil, 
though his own heart fail him and hundreds fall away. When 
he comes, he is to anoint Gentile and Hebrew, king and prophet. 
His work is not. over; it has just begun. In the three names, 
Hazael, Jehu, Elisha, is contained the history of the next genera- 
tion of Israel. 

But the vision reaches beyond his own immediate horizon. It 
discloses to him the true relation of a prophet to the world and 
to the Church. The queen with fire and sword, the splendid 
temples of Jezreel and Samaria, the whole nation gone astray 
after her, seemed to be on the one side, and the solitary prophet 
in the solitary wilderness on the other side. So it seemed, but so 
it was not. The wind, the earthquake and the fire might pass 
over him, but God was not in them. Nor was he in the pow:r 
and grandeur of the state or Church of Israel. Deep down in 
the heart of the nation, in the caves of Carmel, unknown to him, 
unknown to each other, are seven thousand who had not, by word 
or deed, acknowledged the power of Baal. In them God was 
still present. In them was the first announcement of the doc- 
trine, often repeated by later prophets, of an “ Israel within Is- 
rael” — of a remnant of good which embraced the true hope of 
the future. It is the profound evangelical truth, then first begin- 
ning to dawn upon the earth, that there is a distinction between 
the nation and the individual, between the outward divisions of 


ELIJAH. 


301 


sects or Churches and the inward divisions which run across 
them— good in the midst of evil, truth in the midst of error, 
internal invisible agreement amidst external visible dissension. 

It is further a revelation to Elijah, not only concerning him- 
self and the world, but concerning God also. ' He himself had 
shared in the outward manifestations of divine favor which ap- 
peared to mark the old dispensation — the fire on Carmel, the 
storm from the Mediterranean, the avenging sword on the banks 
of the Kishon. These signs had failed, and he was now told that 
in these signs, in the highest sense, God was not — not in these, 
but in the still small gentle whisper of conscience and solitude, 
was the surest token that God was near to him. Nay, not in his 
own mission, grand and gigantic as it was, would after ages so 
clearly discern the divine inspiration, as in the still small voice 
of justice and truth that breathed through the writings of the 
later prophets, for whom he only prepared the way — Hosea, 
Amos, Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah. Not in the vengeance which 
through Hazael and Jehu was to sweep away the house of Omri, 
so much as in the discerning love which was to spare the seven 
thousand ; not in the strong east wind that parted the Red Sea, 
or the fire that swept the top of Sinai, or the earthquake that 
shook down the walls of Jericho, would God be brought so near 
to man, as in the still small voice of the Child at Bethlehem, as 
in the ministrations of Him whose cry was not heard in the 
streets, in the awful stillness of the cross, in the never-failing 
order of Providence, in the silent, insensible influence of the 
good deeds and good words of God and of man. This is the 
predictive element of Elijah’s prophecies. The history of the 
Church had made a vast stride since the days of Moses. Here 
we see, in an irresistible form, the true unity of the Bible. The 
sacred narrative rises above itself to a world hidden as yet from 
the view of those to whom the vision was revealed and by whom 
it was recorded. There is already a gospel of Elijah. He, the 
farthest removed of all the prophets from the evangelical spirit 


302 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


and character, has yet enshrined in the heart of his story the 
most forcible of protests against the hardness of Judaism — the 
noblest anticipation of the breadth and depth of Christianity. 

From this, the culminating point of Elijah’s life, we are called 
abruptly to the renewal of his personal history and his relations 
with Ahab. 

It is characteristic of the sacred history that the final doom of 
the dynasty of Omri should be called forth, not by its idolatry 
nor by its persecution of the prophets, but by an act of injustice 
to an individual, a private citizen. 

On the eastern slope of the hill of Jezreel, immediately outside 
the walls, was a smooth plot of ground which Ahab, in his desire 
for the improvement of his favorite residence, wished to turn 
into a garden. But it belonged to Naboth, a Jezreelite of dis- 
tinguished birth, who sturdily refused, perhaps with something 
of a religious scruple, to part with it for any price or equivalent : 
u Jehovah forbid that I should give to thee the inheritance of 
my fathers.” The rights of an Israelite landowner were not to 
be despised. The land had descended to Naboth, possibly, from 
the first partition of the tribes. Omri, the father of Ahab, had 
given a great price for the hill of Samaria to its owner Shemer. 
David would not take the threshing-floor on Moriah, even from 
the heathen Araunah, without a payment. The refusal brought 
on a peculiar mood of sadness, described on two occasions in 
Ahab and in no one else. But in his palace there was one who 
cared nothing for the scruples which tormented the conscience 
even of the worst of the kings of Israel. In the pride of her 
conscious superiority to the weakness of her husband, “ Jezebel 
came to him and said, Dost thou now govern the kingdom of 
Israel? Arise, and eat bread, and let thine heart be merry: 
1 will give thee the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite.” It is 
the same contrast — true to nature — that we know so well in 
iEgisthus and Clytemnestra, in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, 
where the feebler resolution of the man has been urged to the 


ELIJAH. 


303 


last crime by the bold and more relentless spirit of the woman. 
She wrote the warrant in Ahab’s name ; she gave the hint to the 
chiefs and nobles of the city. An assembly was called, at the 
head of which Naboth, by virtue of his high position, was placed. 
There, against him, as he so stood, the charge of treason was 
brought according to the forms of the Jewish law. The two or 
three necessary witnesses were produced and set before him. The 
sentence was pronounced. The whole family were involved in the 
ruin. Naboth and his sons, in the darkness of the night, were 
dragged out from the city. According to one account, the capital 
was the scene, and in the usual place of execution at Samaria, by 
the side of the great tank or pool (here as at Hebron) Naboth and 
his sons were stoned, and the blood from their mangled remains 
ran down into the reservoir and was licked up, on the broad 
margin of stone, by the ravenous dogs which infest an Eastern 
capital, and by the herds of swine which were not allowed to 
enter the Jewish city. “Then they sent to Jezebel, saying, 
Naboth is stoned and is dead.” And she repeated to Ahab all 
that he cared to hear : “ Naboth is not alive, but is dead.” Then 
the pang of remorse shot through his heart. “ When he heard 
that Naboth was dead, he rent his clothes and put on sackcloth.” 
But this was for the first moment only. From the capital of 
Samaria, as it would seem, he rose up and went down the steep 
descent which leads to the plain of Jezreel. He went in state, 
in his royal chariot. Behind him, probably in the same chariot, 
were two of the great officers of his court — Bidkar, and one 
whose name afterward bore a dreadful sound in the house of 
Ahab, Jehu, the son of Jehoshaphat, the son of Nimshi. And 
now they neared the city of Jezreel ; and now the green terraces 
appeared which Ahab at last might call his own, with no ob- 
stinate owner to urge against him the claims of law and of 
property ; and there was the fatal vineyard, the vacant plot of 
ground, waiting for its new possessor. There is a solitary figure 
standing on the deserted ground, as though the dead Naboth had 


304 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


risen from his bloody grave to warn off the king from his un- 
lawful gains. It is Elijah. As in the most pathetic of Grecian 
dramas the unjust sentence has no sooner been pronounced on 
the unfortunate Antigone than Tiresias rises up to pronounce 
the curse on the Theban king, so in this grander than any Gre- 
cian tragedy the well-known prophet is there to utter the doom 
of the house of Ahab. He comes, we know not whence. He 
has arisen ; he has come down at the word of the Lord to meet 
the king, as once before, in this second crisis of his life. Few 
and short were the words which fell from those awful lips, and 
they are variously reported. But they must have fallen like 
thunderbolts on that royal company. They were never for- 
gotten. Years afterward, long after Ahab and Elijah had gone 
to their account, two of that same group found themselves once 
again on that same spot, and a king, the son of Ahab, lay dead 
at their feet, and Jehu turned to Bidkar and said, “ Remember 
how that thou and I rode behind Ahab his father, when the 
Lord laid this burden upon him. Surely yesternight I saw the 
blood of Naboth and the blood of his sons, saith Jehovah, and I 
will requite thee in this plat, saith Jehovah.” And not only on 
that plat, but wherever the house of Ahab should be found, and 
wherever the blood of Naboth had left its traces, the decree of 
vengeance was pronounced ; the horizon was darkened with the 
visions of vultures glutting on the carcasses of the dead, and the 
packs of savage dogs feeding on their remains or lapping up their 
blood. All these threats the youthful soldier heard, unconscious 
that he was to be their terrible executioner. But it was on Ahab 
himself that the curse fell with the heaviest weight. He burst 
at once into the familiar cry, “Hast thou found me, O mine 
enemy ?” The prophet and the king parted, to meet no more. 
But the king’s last act was an act of penitence : on every anni- 
versary of Naboth’s death he wore the Eastern signs of mourn- 
ing. And the prophet’s words were words of mercy. It was as 
if the revelation of “the still small voice” was becoming clearer 


ELIJAH. 


305 


and clearer. For in the heart of Ahab there was a sense of 
better things, and that sense is recognized and blessed. 

It was three years afterward that the first part of Elijah’s 
curse, in its modified form, fell on the royal house. The scene 
is given at length, apparently to bring before us the gradual 
working out of the catastrophe. The Syrian war, which forms 
the background of the whole of the history of Omri’s dynasty, 
furnishes the occasion. To recover the fortress of Ramoth- 
Gilead is the object of the battle. The kings of Judah and 
Israel are united for the grand effort. The alliance is confirmed 
by the marriage of Athaliah, the daughter of Ahab, with Je- 
horam, the son of Jehoshaphat. The names of the two royal 
families are intermixed for the first time since the separation of 
the kingdoms. Jehoshaphat comes down in state to Samaria. 
A grand sacrificial feast for him and his suite is prepared. The 
two kings — an unprecedented sight — sit side by side, each on his 
throne, in full pomp, in the wide open space before the gateway 
of Samaria. Once again, though in a less striking form, is re- 
peated the conflict between the true and false prophesyings, as at 
Carmel. Four hundred prophets of Baal, yet evidently profess- 
ing the worship of Jehovah, and Israelites, not foreigners — all, 
in one mystic chorus, urged the war. Only one exception was 
heard to the general acclamation — not Elijah, but one who, ac- 
cording to Jewish tradition, had once before foretold the fall of 
Ahab — Micaiah, the son of Imlah. 

In the battle that follows under the walls of Ramoth-Gilead 
everything centres on this foredoomed destruction of Ahab. All 
his precautions are baffled. Early in the day, an arrow, which 
tradition ascribed to the hand of Naaman, pierced the king’s 
breastplate. He felt his death-wound, but, with a nobler spirit 
than had appeared in his life, he w r ould not have it disclosed, 
lest the army should be discouraged. The tide of battle rose 
higher and higher till nightfall. The Syrian army retired to the 
fortress. Then, and not till then, as the sun went down, did the 
20 


306 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


herald of the army proclaim, “ Every man to his city, and every 
man to his country,” for the Icing is dead . 

The long-expected event had indeed arrived. The king, who 
had stood erect in the chariot till that moment, sank down dead. 
His body was carried home to the royal burial-place in Samaria, 
But the manner of his end left its traces in a form not to be mis- 
taken. The blood which all through that day had been flowing 
from his wound had covered both the armor in which he was 
dressed and the chariot in which he had stood for so many hours. 
The chariot — perhaps the armor — was washed in state. But the 
bystanders remembered that the blood, shed as it had been on 
the distant battle-field, streamed into the same waters which had 
been polluted by the blood of Naboth and his sons, and was 
lapped up from the margin by the same dogs and swine still 
prowling round the spot, and that when the abandoned outcasts 
of the city — probably those who had assisted in the profligate 
rites of the temple of Ashtaroth — came, according to their shame- 
less usage, for their morning bath in the pool, they found it red 
with the blood of the apostate king of Israel. So were accom- 
plished the warnings of Elijah and Micaiah. 

With the fall of Ahab a series of new characters appear on the 
eventful scene. Elijah still remained for a time, but only to 
make way for successors. In the meeting of the four hundred 
prophets at Samaria he was not present. In the reign of Ahaziah 
and of Jehoram he appears but for a moment. There was a 
letter — the only written prophecy ascribed to him, and the only 
link which connected him with the history of Judah — addressed 
to the young prince who reigned with his father Jehoshaphat at 
Jerusalem. There was a sudden apparition of a. strange being, 
on the heights of Carmel, to the messengers whom Ahaziah had 
sent to consult an oracle in Philistia. They were passing, prob- 
ably, along the “ haunted strand” between the sea and the moun- 
tain. They heard the warning voice. They returned to their 
master. Their description could only apply to one man : it must 


ELIJAH. 


307 


be the wild prophet of the desert whom he had heard described 
by his father and grandfather. Troop after troop was sent to 
arrest the enemy of the royal house — to seize the lion in his den. 
On the top of Carmel they saw the solitary form. But he was 
not to be taken by human force ; stroke after stroke of celestial 
fire was to destroy the armed bands before he descended from the 
rocky height and delivered his message to the dying king. It 
was to this act, some centuries afterward, not far from the same 
spot, that the two ardent youths appealed, and provoked that 
divine rebuke which places the whole career of Elijah in its 
fitting place, as something in its own nature transitory, pre- 
cursive, preparatory. 

Another was now to take his place. The time was come when 
“ the Lord would take Elijah into heaven by a tempest.” Those 
long wanderings were now over. No more was that awful figure 
to be seen on Carmel nor that stern voice heard in Jezreel. For 
the last time he surveyed, from the heights of the western Gilgal, 
the whole scene of his former career — the Mediterranean Sea, 
Carmel and the distant hills of Gilead — and went the round of 
the consecrated haunts of Gilgal, Bethel, Jericho. One faithful 
disciple was with him — the son of Shaphat, whom he at first 
called on his way from Sinai to Damascus, and who, after the 
manner of Eastern attendants, stood by him to pour water over 
his hands in his daily ablutions. With that tenderness which is 
sometimes blended with the most rugged natures, at each suc- 
cessive halt the older prophet turned to his youthful companion 
and entreated him to stay : “ Tarry here, I pray thee, for the 
Lord hath sent me to Bethel, ... to Jericho, ... to Jordan.” 
But in each case Elisha replied with an asseveration that ex- 
pressed his undivided and unshaken trust in his master and his 
master’s God : “ As the Lord liveth, and as thy soul liveth, I 
will not leave thee.” At Bethel and at Jericho the students in 
the schools that had gathered round those sacred spots came out 
with the sad presentiment that for the last time they were to see 


308 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


the revered instructor who had given new life to their studies, 
and they turned to their fellow-disciple: “ Knowest thou not 
that the Lord will take away thy master from thy head to-day ?” 
And to every such remonstrance he replied, with emphasis, “Yea, 
I know it ; hold ye your peace.” No dread of that final parting 
could deter him from the mournful joy of seeing with his own 
eyes the last moments, of hearing with his own ears the last 
•words, of the prophet of God. “ And they two went on.” They 
went on alone. They descended the long weary slopes that lead 
from Jericho to the Jordan. On the upper terraces, or on the 
mountain-heights behind the city, stood “afar off,” in awe, fifty 
of the young disciples, “and they two stood by Jordan.” They 
stood by its rushing stream, but they were not to be detained by 
even its barrier. “ The aged Gileadite cannot rest till he again 
sets foot on his own side of the river.” He ungirds the rough 
mantle from around his shaggy frame; he “rolled it together” 
as if into a wonder-working staff; he “smote” the turbid river 
as though it were a living enemy, and the “ waters divided hither 
and thither, and they two went over on dry ground.” And now 
they were on that farther shore, under the shade of those hills of 
Pisgah and of Gilead, where, in former times, a prophet greater 
even than Elijah had been withdrawn from the eyes of his people 
— whence, in his early youth, Elijah himself had descended in 
his august career. He knew that his hour was come; he knew 
that he had at last returned home; that he was to go whither 
Moses had gone before him ; and he turned to Elisha to ask for 
his last wish. One only gift was in Elisha’s mind to ask : 
“ 1 pray thee, let a double portion ” — if it be only two morsels^ 
two-thirds — “ of thy spirit be upon me,” the right of the first- 
born son. 

It was a hard thing that to be asked, but it was granted on 
one condition. If he was able to retain to the end the same 
devoted perseverance, and keep his eye set and steadfast on the 
departing prophet, the gift would be his. “ And as they still 


ELIJAH. 


309 

went on”— upward, it may be, toward the eastern hills, talking 
as they went— “ behold there appeared a chariot of fire, and 
horses of fire, and parted them both asunder.” This was the 
severance of the two friends. 

Then came a furious storm. “And Elijah went up by a 
whirlwind into heaven.” In this inextricable interweaving of fact 
and figure, it is enough to mark how fitly such an act closes such 
a life. “ My father, my father,” Elisha cried, “ the chariot of 
Israel, and the horsemen thereof.” So Elijah had stood a sure 
defence to his country against all the chariots and horsemen that 
were ever pouring in upon them from the surrounding nations. 
So he now seemed, when he passed away, lost in the flames of 
the steeds and the car that swept him from the earth, as in the 
fire of his own unquenchable spirit — in the fire which had thrice 
blazed around him in his passage through his troubled earthly 
career. And as in its fiery force and energy, so in its mystery, 
the end corresponded to the beginning. He had appeared in the 
history we know not whence, and now he is gone in like manner. 
As of Moses, so of Elijah — “no man knoweth his sepulchre; no 
man knoweth his resting-place until this day.” On some lonely 
peak or in some deep ravine the sons of the prophets vainly 
hoped to find him, cast away by the breath of the Lord, as in 
former times: “And they sought him three days, but found him 
not.” He was gone, no more to be seen by mortal eyes, or, if 
ever again, only in far distant ages, when his earthly likeness 
should once again appear in that same sacred region, or when, on 
the summit of “a high mountain apart, by themselves,” three 
disciples, like Elisha, should be gathered round a Master whose 
departure they were soon expecting, “and there appeared unto 
them Moses and Elijah talking with him.” The ascension or 
assumption of Elijah stands out alone in the Jewish history as 
the highest representation of the end of a great and good career; 
of death as seen under its noblest aspect — as the completion and 
crown of the life which had preceded it — as the mysterious 


310 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


shrouding of the departed within the invisible world. By a 
sudden stroke of storm and whirlwind, or, as we may almost 
literally say of the martyrs of old, by chariots and horses of fire, 
the servants of God pass away. We know not where they r jst ; 
we may search high and low, in the height of the highest peak 
of our speculations, or in the depths of the darkest shadow of the 
valley of death. Legend upon legend may gather round them, 
as upon Elijah, but the sacred record itself is silent. One only 
mode or place there is where we may think of them, as of Elijah 
— in those who come afterward in their power and spirit, or in 
that one Presence which still brings us near to them, in the 
Mount of Transfiguration, in communion with the beloved of 
God. 




XXIII. 

ELISHA. 

HE close of the career of Elijah is the beginning of the 
career of Elisha. It had been when he was ploughing, 
with a vast array of oxen before him, in the rich pas- 
tures of the Jordan valley, that Elijah swept past him. 
Without a word he had stripped off the rough mantle of his office 
and thrown it over the head of the wondering youth. Without 
a moment’s delay he had stalked on as if he had done nothing. 
But Elisha had rushed after the prophet, and had obtained the 
playful permission to return for a farewell to his father and 
mother in a solemn sacrificial feast, and had then followed him 
ever since. He had seen his master to the end ; he had uttered a 
loud scream of grief as he saw him depart ; he had rent asunder 
his own garments, as in mourning for the dead. The mantle 
which fell from Elijah was now his. From that act and those 
words has been drawn the figure of speech which has passed into 
a proverb for the succession of the gifts of gifted men. It is one 
of the representations by which, in the Roman Catacombs, the 
early Christians consoled themselves for the loss of their departed 
friends. With the mantle he descends once more to the Jordan- 
stream and wields it in his hand. The waters (so one version 
of the text represents the scene) for a moment hesitate : “ they 
divided not.” He invokes the aid of Him to whose other holy 
names he adds the new epithet of “ The God of Elijah ;” and 
then the waters “part hither and thither,” and he passes over 



312 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


and is in his own native region. In the western valley of the 
Jordan, in the gardens and groves of Jericho, now fresh from its 
recent restoration, he takes up his abode, as “the lord” of his 
new disciples. They see at once that “the spirit of Elijah rests 
upon Elisha,” and they “ bow themselves to the ground before 
him.” 

From the earliest times the city of Jericho is associated with 
some of the most remarkable displays of a special providence, 
and of the divine blessing as accompanying a special people. 
The plain of Jericho, in which the city lay, is one extending for 
many miles; — from Scythopolis to the bay of the Dead Sea. It is 
encircled by ridges of rugged, barren mountains. The ancient 
city was situated to the north-east of Jerusalem about twenty 
miles, and six from the river Jordan. The road from Jericho to 
Jerusalem was through these desolate mountain-passes and deep 
defiles — in all ages a most dangerous way, infested by banditti 
of the worst character. With beautiful appropriateness our 
Saviour spake the instructive parable of the good Samaritan in 
reference to this very hazardous road, showing not only what 
was too common in it — robbery with cruelty — but also the still 
greater necessity for assistance, and the true human sympathy of 
him who aided the injured traveler, as well as, in more con- 
demnatory contrast, the hard-heartedness both of the priest and 
Levite. 

It must have been a solemn spectacle, that of a whole people 
carrying the ark, the visible symbol of their covenant relation to 
their present and all-powerful God, marching for seven days in 
order around the city of Jericho, once every day for six days, and 
seven times on the last day, with no sound but the rough music 
of the rams’ horns, accompanying it on the seventh day with a 
shout from the whole multitude, when immediately the city walls 
fell to the ground, and every man entered at the place opposite 
to him. The city, by divine appointment, being doomed, they 
set fire to it, consecrating all the gold, silver and brass, and from 


ELISHA. 


313 


amongst its inhabitants saving only Rahab and her family, be- 
cause of her kindness to the spies. Joshua pronounced on it an 
anathema, not only as it then stood, but on him who should, on 
the same site, attempt to rebuild it. Very remarkably this was 
fulfilled. Hiel of Bethel, five hundred and thirty-seven years 
afterward, restored the city. At the laying of its foundations he 
lost his eldest son, Abiram, and when the gates were hung, his 
youngest son, Segub. 

Another Jericho, however, was erected a short time after 
Joshua’s destruction of the former. It stood in the same plain, 
and is that which, in the Book of Judges, is called “ a city of 
palm trees.” Here the ambassadors of King David remained 
after they had been maltreated by the Ammonites, till their 
beards were grown again, and near to it the prophet Elisha 
sweetened the waters. It is • worthy of remark that Josephus 
mentions a plentiful spring whose streams made the fruits of the 
earth and of the trees to decay, and was also injurious to health ; 
but being cured by Elisha, they were rendered as useful as they 
had been formerly deleterious. Elisha goes to Jericho to remain 
in the school of the prophets till he receives the commands of the 
Lord. God’s servants are they who wait to know and to do his 
will. He is soon recognized as the successor of Elijah. What 
they could not ask of the one prophet — for they feared him — 
they had no difficulty in asking of the other. Here the milder 
and more attractive radiance of Elisha shines forth. The deputa- 
tion that waited upon him from the city represent in few words 
its true condition — the situation as pleasant, but the ground as 
barren and the waters as bad. And what could possibly be 
worse? The most common of all God’s mercies is water, and 
often the most despised. Still, what is a town or city without it 
but a scene of discomfort, disease and death? The fertility of 
the soil depends largely on the quantity and quality of water, 
whilst most assuredly it is Heaven’s gift to man, both for his 
happipess and health. Would that men knew better its value, 


314 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


and saw God’s hand more plainly in this and in every gift of his 
beneficent and wonder-working providence ! 

The request of the deputation from Jericho to Elisha was the 
voice of humanity — a voice which no prophet of the Lord ever 
heedlessly disregarded. “ Bring me/’ says he, “a new cruse, and 
put salt therein.” It was fetched. Observe, the “ cruse” must 
be “new” and filled with salt. Away the prophet hastens to- 
ward the waters; nor does he tarry till he reaches the fountain. 
Not in the running stream, but in the spring, does he cast the 
salt. And taking no honor to himself, as a mere instrument, 
however much others contemplated his work with gratitude, he 
gives all the glory to God, saying, “Thus saith the Lord, I have 
healed these waters; there shall not be from thence any more 
death or barren land. So the waters were healed unto this day.” 
What a change must have been produced by this one act of 
mercy! No day could pass without a remembrance of the 
prophet, and no reaping season could return without a recur- 
rence to his miraculous interference. 

But what a lesson of life does the miracle exhibit ! It is salt 
which is used to heal the waters. The gospel is salt ; by it men 
are kept from corruption and are purified. There is no other 
cure; and the salt must be cast into the spring. Had the 
prophet healed the waters only as they ran in their accustomed 
channels, the sweet would again have given place to those that 
were bitter, flowing from the unchanged fountain. But no; the 
spring itself must be healed. How often men resolve that their 
lives shall be reformed ! Some sudden providence, some afflictive 
bereavement, some stirring sermon, brings about a temporary 
change. Old haunts are deserted ; old habits are suspended ; 
they seem new characters. Alas ! it is soon to return to their 
former ways, the good gone, and their last state even worse than 
the first. And why is this? The reformation was merely out- 
ward — the heart was still the same; the waters of the stream 
were sweetened, but the fountain was still bitter. So is it with 


ELISHA. 


315 


all external reformations. What is needed is a new heart, and 
then will quickly follow a new life. This is possessed alone in 
the “ new way” of the gospel, in Jesus the Saviour, set forth by 
the “new cruse;” this is produced by the truth of the gospel, 
typified by the “salt;” this is wrought by the Spirit of God, 
through the instrumentality of gospel means, shown in the 
prophet speaking in the Lord’s name, accompanied by divine 
power ; and this is evidenced in a complete and lasting change 
of life, from sin to holiness, even as the waters of Jericho were 
transformed from bitter to sweet, from engendering disease and 
barrenness to occasioning health and fertility. 

Elisha had not long to tarry at Jericho. He must go and do 
the work of God in other parts. A lasting boon had he con- 
ferred on the city and the plain, with which to this day his name 
is associated and the well shown. A prophet’s mission is not all 
mercy. There must be darkness as well as light, or light will 
cease to be valued. The very judgments of God are mercies, 
though men do not so understand them. The discipline of a school 
must be strict when that is required, and gentle and encouraging 
where timidity keeps from a healthful development. The world 
is God’s college, and, like a wise father, he instructs his people 
by a smile or a frown, just as their condition demands. As the 
prophet proceeds to Mount Carmel, he passes through Bethel. 
Who can mention Bethel wdthout a remembrance both of Jacob’s 
vision and his God? Now, however, Jehovah is forgotten, and 
his altars deserted by its inhabitants. This was one of the cities 
dedicated to the worship of the golden calves set up by Jeroboam, 
the son of Nebat. No sooner was the prophet of the Lord recog- 
nized as he came near to the city than he was assailed by a 
multitude of profane “young men,” called in our translation 
“little children” — a designation often given to grown persons 
who exhibit childish folly. They came forth and mocked him. 
“ Go up, thou bald head ! go up, thou bald head !” was their 
iniquitous cry. The phrase “go up” had an obvious reference 


316 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


to Elijah’s translation, and implied their detestation of his suc- 
cessor, and their desire that, like him, he might betake himself 
from the earth ; and the epithet “ bald head” was most insulting, 
as referring to that description of baldness produced by leprosy, 
and esteemed in the East most ignominious. The indignant 
prophet considered their conduct as showing how the inhabitants 
of the city preferred their false gods and false prophets to the 
God of Israel and his servants, and resented it. They must be 
punished, that their parents and relatives, with the whole city, 
may be made to fear. He “ turned round and cursed them in 
the name of the Lord.” The wicked are caught in their own 
wickedness; and immediately “two she-bears came forth out of 
the woods and tare forty and two of them” — “tare” them mean- 
ing, as the original word implies, “grievously lacerating and 
wounding them;” thus teaching the people of Bethel, as Dr. 
Waterland remarks, “to train up their children, in future, to 
good manners and the fear of God, and, for the present, they 
might see how God detested scoffers and mockers, and what 
reverence he expected to be paid to his commissioned prophets.” 

It is a serious matter to have to do with the servants of the 
Most High. Commissioned by him to accomplish his work, he 
sends none a warfare on their own charges. He is both their 
shield and their sun, their protector and provider. Nothing can 
be more ruinous than the course which some parents pursue 
before their children. They have scarcely a kind or generous 
word to utter concerning Christian ministers. They fill their 
minds full of prejudices both against the Lord’s servants and 
their work, and then wonder how they are not impressed and 
affected by the solemn verities to which, from time to time, they 
listen. This conduct is as destructive to the souls of the young 
as the tearing of the bears was to the bodies of the “ little chil- 
dren” of Bethel. It ought to be guarded against with all the 
holy jealousy which the love of heaven can inspire and with all 
the abhorrent dread which the fear of hell can create; whilst 


ELISIIA. 


317 


young people should ever remember this history, learning from 
it to respect age, to reverence truth, to honor the servants of the 
Most High, to learn from them, not to mock them ; to follow 
them in their faith and piety, not to jeer at their infirmities or 
pour contempt upon their kindness. 

A striking change in the name “ Bethel ” may here be noted. 
It was called by the Hebrews who adhered to the house of David 
and the worship of Jehovah, Bethaven ; the former name meaning 
“ the house of God the latter, “ the house of iniquity.” This 
arose from the idolatry of the inhabitants of Bethel. Onward, 
Elisha, from this Bethaven ! Let the mothers weep ; let the 
fathers talk and think ; let the young mockers tremble, believe 
and bow before Him whom prophets serve ! This is not a place 
at which to tarry. Elisha must go on to Carmel. He hastens 
thither. Well can he meditate there. There his master con- 
quered idolatry and set it at naught before all the people. The 
scene and its associations strengthen faith, quicken spiritual life, 
cherish hope and lead to renewed service. For a season, at 
Carmel the prophet rests. 

THE WAR WITH MOAB — A POOR WIDOW— THE WOMAN 
OF SHUNEM. 

It is now stirring times in Israel. Preparations are being 
made for war. The country, from one end to the other, is 
awakened before the summons of its king. The military spirit 
is by far the most easily aroused in fallen human nature, man’s 
antagonism to man, his love of glory, his desire for conquest and 
his lust for power being passions always too freely nurtured in 
the bosom of our common depravity. Very fearful in every 
aspect is war, yet its concomitants of tinseled habiliments, gaudy 
equipages, martial music and mighty feats of prowess have lent 
to it in all ages a terrible charm, moving the inmost soul of the 
young and daring, and rendering to the most reckless acts an 
appearance of lawful and honorable pre-eminence. Happy that 


318 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


day when men shall learn the art of war no more ! but, alas ! its 
dawn is still distant. 

The occasion of this Israelitish war was a justifiable one, ac- 
cording to the common estimate in such matters. The king of 
Moab, from the days of David, had been tributary, paying 
annually a hundred thousand lambs and a hundred thousand 
rams, with the wool, to the kings of Israel. This they now 
refuse, and the soldiers of Israel “ put on steel to recover their 
cloth.” Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, unites in this campaign 
with the king of Israel, as did also the king of Edom, whose 
sovereignty at that time was subject to Judah. This alliance 
was natural, inasmuch as there now existed the most cordial 
friendship between Jehoshaphat and Jehoram, as well as from 
the Moabites having previously united with the Syrians against 
Judah. Israel, too, had partially reformed itself, under its 
present king, from idolatry — at least so as to render their case 
more hopeful in the eyes of the good Jehoshaphat. The armies 
gather ; they are to march through Edom in order to encompass 
Moab ; the kings are in the camp ; homes and kindred are left 
behind, and quickly they reach the sterile desert. 

Elisha, the year after he had gone to Mount Carmel, appears 
to have spent a portion of time in Samaria. Such a movement 
in the country as that which was now occurring was not likely 
to be overlooked by him. How it came to pass that he was at 
this period near to the army is not recorded ; but where he is 
needed, there he is providentially found. That King Jehosha- 
phat should lead his army into the desert of Edom without 
first consulting his God is an oversight to be loudly condemned. 
Jehoram does not appear to regard the guidance of Jehovah. *It 
is an act of true piety, however, having neglected a duty, as 
speedily as possible to repair the evil. The whole army was now- 
suffering fearful hardships from want of water. What could be 
done? Were the Moabites to come upon them in their present 
condition, they must be scattered and perish. What are the 


ELISHA. 


319 


most skillful commanders, what the noblest equipments, what 
the most powerful batteries, if the numerous forces are paralyzed 
by cold or conquered by heat? Monarchs and their armies 
must be taught that “ all the springs are in God.” With parched 
lips and burning throats, the three kings confer together in the 
camp. Jehoram deplores their condition, but Jehoshaphat in- 
quires for a prophet of the Lord ; the one sighs in his misery, 
but the other asks in faith. Means which are despised in pros- 
perity are welcomed in the hour of adversity. The advice of the 
king of J udah is adopted, and a prophet is sought. 

How numerous are the instances in which the people of God 
are instructed that “man’s extremity is God’s opportunity”! 
Never did this more fully appear than on the present occasion. 
Inquiry is set on foot for a prophet. One of the attendants of 
Jehoram, unlike his master, who knew Elijah, and was also now 
acquainted with the dwelling of Elisha and with the relation 
which the latter had borne to the former prophet, instantly re- 
plies, “ Here is Elisha, the son of Shaphat, who poured water on 
the hands of Elijah.” Well was he known to Jehoshaphat, and 
fully did he recognize as with him the Spirit of the Lord. The 
three kings go down to the humble prophet. How much is the 
possession of wisdom beyond the possession of wealth ! These 
three sovereigns place themselves at the feet of this lowly saint. 

The presence of Jehoram is offensive to Elisha. The patron 
of sin ought never to receive any sanction to his wickedness from 
the minister of salvation. If the sufferings of a sinner bring him 
for help to a believer, he must be told his state as well as relieved 
from his wretchedness. The king of Israel pleads not with the 
prophet in his own name, but in the name of his allies, and 
especially in that of the king of Judah. Personally he is re- 
buked, and that with much fidelity ; but his plea is admitted, 
and Elisha replies, “As the Lord of hosts liveth, before whom I 
stand ; surely, were it not that I regard the presence of Jehosha- 
phat, the king of Judah, I would not look toward thee, nor see 


320 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


thee .’ 7 Plain and painful words are these for the ears of a king, 
and such as the mere courtiers both of the past ages and of the 
present would shudder to address to those in power; but the 
prophets were faithful men, and cared more for the favor of God 
than for the strongest arm of flesh. Bold as was Elijah, not less 
so was his successor. But in the presence of Jehoram the 
prophet’s heart is troubled ; the Spirit of the Lord has never 
dwelt with discord ; if he is to be informed of the will of God 
regarding that of which he was now consulted, his mind must be 
calmed, his spirit soothed, and his whole frame be reduced into a 
condition of patient waiting at the divine footstool. 

We have elsewhere referred to the custom in the schools of the 
prophets of cultivating music. Who has not felt the influence 
of melodious harmony in rendering the soul devotional ? Elisha 
requires a minstrel; one is immediately brought. Wrapped in 
his mantle, abstracted from the gaze of kings or people, the 
prophet lends his soul to the sweet sounds now falling on his 
ear. He tarries not long before he receives a visit from his God ; 
every eye fixed, the kings and their attendants anxiously await- 
ing the issue, quickly the prophet rises from his seat. The 
minstrel ceases ; Elisha points to the surrounding valley, and 
commands, saying, “ Make it full of ditches.” No wind shall 
blow, no rain shall fall, yet that valley shall be filled with water, 
that you may drink, both you and your cattle. Not only so, for 
this is a light matter with the Lord ; your enemies shall fall by 
your hands ; their fenced cities shall become a ruin ; their wells 
of water shall be filled up ; their defeat shall be complete. But 
this shall not be to-night. Water shall be given you to-morrow, 
at the time of the morning sacrifice. There is still a God in 
Israel to serve. 

The exercise of faith in the Lord is the highest act as well as 
the surest evidence of true religion. Such confidence in seasons 
of prosperity is well pleasing ; much more in times of trouble. 
And as the greater the trial, the stronger the faith, so is it all the 


ELISHA. 


321 


more honoring to the Most High. Sovereigns and soldiers in 
the desert of Edom, sorely suffering from thirst, must wait all 
the evening, all the night, till the Lord’s appointed time. 
Elijah’s prayer was answered, and his offering was burnt up, at 
the time of the evening sacrifice; Elisha’s prophecy is accom- 
plished, and the ditches are filled with water at the time of the 
morning sacrifice. God has instituted services, and commanded 
them to be performed at appointed seasons. No great or good 
work can be done without order and regularity. When the 
people pray, then the refreshing waters of the sanctuary flow. 
So now, scarcely had the morning oblation been offered before 
springs gush forth in the desert and fill up every open ditch ; the 
people drink, the army is refreshed, the arm of the Lord is re- 
vealed, and the word of the prophet is fulfilled. Who amongst 
those thousands can ever again forget the power and mercy of 
Jehovah? And yet how soon our past sufferings cease to be 
remembered when health is restored ! 

The enemies of the kings, meanwhile, were alive to their ap- 
proach, and were preparing to meet them. The rising mists, 
occasioned by the burning rays of the sun falling upon these 
miraculous supplies of water, were misunderstood by the scouts 
sent forth to reconnoitre the hosts of Israel and Judah. The 
streams in the ditches, through the haze, assume the appearance 
of pools of blood. The Moabites imagine that the allies had 
fallen out amongst themselves, and that in the dispute many had 
fallen. Now was the moment for them to strike. They press 
forward to the attack. Civil broils give just advantage to the 
common foe. Nothing can be worse than the falling out of 
friends at the moment when the enemy of both pursues. Under 
this deception the Moabites hurry forward and furiously rush 
into the ranks of the united forces arrayed against them. When 
too late, they discover their mistake. The conflict is short, the 
slaughter is terrible. The hosts of Moab betake themselves to 
flight; they are followed, multitudes are slain, their cities are 
21 


322 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


destroyed, their wells are filled up, their trees are felled, their 
lands are marred, desolation covers their borders. One remain- 
ing onslaught completes the campaign. The king of Moab, with 
seven hundred resolute followers, rushes against the Edomites. 
Pie is repulsed, with a disastrous loss, when, either from anger 
at his destiny, or willing by the most costly offering to appease 
his cruel gods, he sacrifices, before all Israel and by his own 
hand, his eldest son. IVhat slaves men are who are led by blind 
superstition ! There is no greater tyrant than the prince of dark- 
ness. Horrified at the sight, the men of Israel and Judah return 
to their own homes. Every word spoken by the prophet was 
fulfilled. 

It has been truly said that reality is far more affecting than 
fiction. The death of the son of the king of Moab as a sacrifice 
shocked the stern soldiers more than the sight of all the heaps 
of slain who fell in battle. Descriptions of personal trials come 
more home to our hearts and sympathies than any of a merely 
general character. The tale of the individual is more thrilling 
than the history of the million. Away from the war against the 
Moabites, Elisha now finds sorrow in the circle of the prophets. 
Those holy men were not too holy to be married or to enjoy 
family comforts. But one of their number had died, leaving a 
widow and two sons, and he had died in debt. During such 
reigns as that of Ahab, Ahaziah and Jehoram, it is no matter of 
astonishment that both the priests and prophets of the Lord 
should be in difficulties; but they shall not be forsaken by their 
Master when deserted by the kings, his vicegerents. The widow, 
in her distress, comes to Elisha. Her husband’s creditor threatens 
to seize her sons and sell them for slaves. The mother’s heart is 
lacerated — the widow’s soul is smitten ; but “ God is the husband 
of the widow and the father of the fatherless.” All she had in 
her possession w T as “ a pot of oil” — valuable to her in her poverty ? 
but nothing to meet her necessities. The Lord would have no 
human being a slave, and no servant of his an unnecessary suf- 


ELISHA. 


323 


ferer. The prophet shall relieve and enrich the widow. “ She 
must be a debtor for more,” as Bishop Hall remarks, “ that her 
debts may become less.” She must borrow from all her neigh- 
bors to pay all her creditors. She must borrow the vessels — God 
multiplies the oil. A large number are lent her; the oil is 
poured out, and there is more than enough to fill them all. She 
sells the oil, pays the debt, saves her sons from slavery, and has 
a goodly allowance left behind. 

Spectacle after spectacle of domestic trial and triumph, en- 
grossing our most tender affections, fills up the mission of Elisha. 
Traveling from one part to another, doing and making known 
the Lord’s will, “it fell on a day” that he entered Shunem. In 
this city of Issachar there dwelt a lady who is described as a 
“great (or wealthy) woman.” As the prophet passed her house, 
she constrained him to come in and share her hospitality. This 
was the beginning of their friendship ; it became intimate, inso- 
much that “ as oft as he passed by he turned in thither to eat 
bread.” It was after one of these occasions that this kind- 
hearted Shunammite, affected by the excellence of the prophet, 
proposed to her husband to erect on the wall “ a prophet’s cham- 
ber,” and to furnish it, so that whenever Elisha came that way 
he might have a home. The husband readily complied, and 
often did “the man of God” find in that lowly room a resting- 
place for his weary feet in the days of his pious pilgrimage. 
Never yet has kindness shown to the servants of the Most High 
gone unrewarded. There is One who forgets not “ the cup of 
cold water given to a disciple in the name of a disciple.” Nor 
did “the woman of Shunem” lose her reward. Grateful for 
great attention, on one occasion Elisha sends his servant Gehazi 
to inquire of her what he could do for her. Her reply bespeaks 
her character. “ She lived,” she said, “ among her own people,” 
intimating that she had what she wished, and was satisfied with 
what she had. Gehazi reminded his master that she was child- 
less. The hint was taken : the Shunammitish woman was called > 


324 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


she was informed that she will have a child ; and in due time 
she became the happy mother of a son. 

How often it happens that our most precious mercies become 
the sources of our sorest trials ! Children are both great comforts 
and great cares. What anxiety encircles their infancy ! what 
watchfulness their childhood ! what concern their increasing 
years! and when they reach maturity, to possess evidences of 
their piety and to see them respectably situated in life, many a 
prayerful season and sleepless hour registers the extent of parental 
regard and the weight of parental responsibility. And trial soon 
came to the widow through her son. “ When he was grown,” 
having gone into the fields where his father’s reapers were en- 
gaged, he was seized with illness, so that he was obliged to cry 
out, “ My head ! my head !” He was carried home, but it was 
to die. Whither, oh whither, shall the afflicted mother betake 
herself in her sorrow ? — whither but to “ the man of God” ? To 
him she hastens. She is seen by him whilst yet distant. He 
sends Gehazi to inquire the occasion of her visit, and whether all 
was well. Knowing that whatever happens under God must be 
right, she answers, “It is well.” Next moment she is at the 
prophet’s feet, tells him her trial, and prajs him to return with 
her; nor will she leave him to come by himself. Her impor- 
tunity prevails ; they proceed together, and, behold, the child is 
dead. The prophet enters his chamber, where lay the youth, 
calls upon his God, stretches himself upon the child, and restores 
him to life. Immediately the anxious mother is summoned, her 
son is given to her, and, after an outburst of maternal gratitude 
uttered at Elisha’s feet, she arose and retired. 

What a work was that in which those luminaries of the world, 
in the early days of its history, were so constantly engaged! 
True, they had fearful judgments to announce, painful seasons to 
anticipate ; but their mission was not all concerning “ wrath to 
come.” They brought joy to many a sorrowful bosom, light into 
many a dark dwelling. They went about continually doing 


ELISHA. 


325 


good. Witness Elisha. To enter Jericho and receive the bless- 
ings of its grateful inhabitants ; to visit the prophet's widow and 
£o find her happy with her sons ; to mingle songs of praise with 
those of the woman of Shunem, on his frequent visits to “ the 
prophet's chamber," over her “ son who was lost and is found," 
— these, as viewed simply in themselves, were events sufficient to 
cheer a lifetime of toil and care. But when they are regarded as 
evidences of a higher call and holier work, they assume an aspect 
of unspeakable moment. They proclaim to all the divine mission 
to which Elisha was appointed ; so also did his service on behalf 
of the armies of Judah, Edom and Israel. From one end of it 
to the other, the land must have rung with the report of the 
prophet’s doings — a glorious testimony to the presence of the 
prophet’s God. This is the consummation of the loftiest aspira- 
tions of every true minister of the Most High. Let there be 
multiplied instances of usefulness, but let all redound to the 
divine glory. Let the people be warned and taught, encouraged 
and kept in the right way; amidst judgments and blessings God 
must be all in all. 

ELISHA AT GILGAL— DEATH IN THE POT— THE LOST 
HATCHET. 

Elisha appears to have visited, in rotation or as occasion re- 
quired, the schools of the prophets in different localities. Four 
years having elapsed, we now find him at Gilgal; it was during 
a season of great dearth. The sons of the prophets suffered in 
common with the rest of the inhabitants. Gehazi is required to 
prepare for them their simple meal of herbs. It happened that 
“ one went out into the field to gather herbs, and found a wild 
vine, and gathered thereof wild gourds, his lap full, and came 
and shred them into the pot of pottage, for they knew them not." 
This u wild vine" was the colocynth, so called from the shape of 
its leaves and the climbing nature of its stems ; it is remarkable 
for its bitter taste and violent purgative qualities, being a strong 


326 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


poison if it is taken in large quantities and unqualified by any 
other mixture. It was at once discovered, when tasted, that 
there was some disagreeable and deleterious ingredient in the 
broth, and with one accord the sons of the prophets, looking to 
Elisha, exclaimed, “ O man of God, there is death in the pot !” 
The prophet hesitates not for a moment; what he knew not by 
learning he receives by revelation; it is mixed with meal, the 
bitter is assuaged, the poison is counteracted and the evil is 
cured. But the painful season of want continued. In this ex- 
tremity God moves the' heart of a man of Baalshalisha, who 
brings of the first-fruits to the prophet a most welcome gift — 
“ twenty loaves of barley, and full ears of corn in the husk.” 
Here we have a collateral evidence (as indeed we have in other 
parts of Scripture) to the fact that the majority of those who re- 
sided in those schools of Israel and Judah belonged to the tribe 
of Levi, and were therefore largely sustained by the free-will 
offerings of the people. But what were a few loaves and a few 
ears of corn to feed so many? He who yearly multiplies the 
handful of seed and sends the harvest can also increase abun- 
dantly this supply. Nor was this blessing withheld in this 
season of trial. They are placed before the people. God’s 
promise to his servant is fulfilled, and “they ate and left 
thereof.” How securely may the faith of the Lord’s people rest 
on the promise, “ Thy bread shall be certain, and thy water shall 
be sure ” ! 

Our attention must now be drawn to an interesting incident 
strikingly indicative of Elisha’s regard to justice as well as gene- 
rosity. The dwellings of the prophets were “ too strait for them,” 
and they wished to enlarge them toward the Jordan. Engaged 
in cutting wood for the purpose, one of their number let an 
axe fall into the water; the sorrow of the mail’s heart, how- 
ever, was not simply because of the loss he had sustained, but 
because the axe was borrowed. The prophet highly appreciated 
his feelings; and casting a piece of wood into the water where 


ELISHA. 


327 


the hatchet had fallen, the iron swam and rose to the surface, so 
that it was restored to him again. How often, in small matters 
as much as in more important affairs, both the presence and in- 
terference of God, as well as the upright character of his servants, 
are made manifest ! Referring to the swimming of iron, a curious 
prediction is mentioned by Dr. Gutzlaff, the late eminent Chinese 
missionary, as having been handed down for ages amongst the 
inhabitants of Siam and China, that “ when iron swims, there 
will come from the West toward the East a religion which shall 
destroy all others, and establish itself for ever.” And when iron 
steamboats were first seen in the Chinese seas, the people on the 
shore shouted, “ The time has come ! iron swims ! the religion 
of the West must conquer !” God, in his inscrutable providence, 
appears now to be fulfilling this tradition. All China, so long 
sealed up from intercourse with other lands, is being thrown 
open. The truth is being professed by multitudes, idolatry is 
shaken to its centre, and events seem to encourage the hope that 
this nation, consisting of more than three hundred and sixty- 
seven millions of human beings, will be “ born in a day.” May 
the fervent prayers of the Churches for this consummation be 
answered and their best hopes be realized ! 

THE GREAT FAMINE— ELISHA’S DEATH— HIS ASHES, AND 
HIS EXCELLENCE. 

Nothing is so remarkable to a careful reader of the times of 
the prophets as the disregard which was shown both to the won- 
derful doings of God and to his servants, alike by kings and 
subjects. No time was allowed to elapse without the people 
being taught that the Lord was God in Israel ; and yet so great 
was the attachment of the tribes to their froward courses that 
they were continually returning to idolatry. Many were the 
severe afflictions which their rebellion cost them, but they seemed 
willing to suffer for the sake of sin. No wonder that at last they 
were forsaken and scattered. 


328 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


As the life of Elisha draws near its close, several circumstances 
of deep interest invite attention. Naaman had not long return d 
to his country before war broke out between Israel and Syria. 
During the struggle the king of the latter country was sorely 
perplexed, having been thwarted in all his designs. The king 
of Israel was made acquainted with his most secret purposes. 
The Syrian monarch imagined that there must be treachery in 
his council, and demanded that all who were attached to the in- 
terests of his enemy should immediately confess. At once the 
reply was, “None, my lord, O king! but Elisha the prophet, 
that is in Israel, telleth the king of Israel the words that thou 
speakest in thy bedchamber.” The fame of Elisha had doubtless 
spread far and wide, through his miraculous cure of Naaman ; 
and indeed it was he who had informed Jehoram of the move- 
ments and purposes of the Syrians, by a knowledge of which 
they were outwitted and overcome. The rage of Benhadad, the 
king of Syria, against Elisha, knew no bounds. He determined 
to seize him ; and hearing that he was at Dothan, a town in the 
tribe of Manasseh, he sent a strong force to take him prisoner 
and bring him to Damascus. The town was surrounded by 
night; and when the prophet’s servant awoke, early in the morn- 
ing, and saw their condition, in despair he cried, “Alas, my 
master I how shall we do?” Undaunted in spirit, unshaken in 
confidence, Elisha replied, “Fear not; for they that be with us 
are more than they that be with them.” The eves of the servant 
were opened, and, “ behold, the mountain was full of horses and . 
chariots of fire round about Elisha.” The Syrians were smitten 
with blindness, and were unconsciously led by the prophet to 
Samaria. Jehoram was inclined to put them all to death ; but 
the prophet whom they came to injure was he who generously 
saved them alive, caused them to be hospitably treated, and in 
peace sent them back to their master. 

More fearful than war, more destructive than pestilence, is 
famine. This is shown in the death-records of many a land and 


ELISHA. 


329 


in the thrilling annals of many a city. But to be afflicted with 
all three — war, famine and pestilence! Indeed, pestilence and 
famine generally journey together. Samaria was now suffering 
from a long and heartrending siege; Israel, from a seven years’ 
famine ; and to such a condition had Samaria been reduced that 
“an ass’s head was sold for fourscore pieces of silver.” Nay, 
contrary to every feeling of nature, and compelled by the fright- 
ful cravings of hunger, a woman had killed and eaten of her own 
child. This fact reached the king’s ears ; it clothed him with 
sackcloth and filled him with sadness; and because Elisha had 
not interceded with God for the city and rescued it from the 
power of the Syrians, he threatened his life. But the power of 
Jehovah was no sooner desired than it was displayed. During 
the night the Syrians were made to hear the sound as of a mighty 
army ; they imagined that the Hittites and Egyptians had come 
up against them, and in affright they fled, leaving behind them 
their tents and all their stores. Four wretched lepers, who sat 
by the gates of the city ready to die, and who determined to 
place themselves in the hands of the Syrians, went to their tents, 
and finding them empty, communicated the joyful tidings to the 
Samaritans. Sorrow gave place to joy, hunger to a rich repast ; 
the prophet was not only spared, but honored, and the hand of 
the Lord was recognized in the deliverance. 

“ Use hospitality” is the short but comprehensive law of Chris- 
tian neighborhood, enjoined upon his followers by their Lord. 
So, at least, he inspired his distinguished apostle, Paul, to incul- 
cate. In the fulfillment of this precept, men have “ entertained 
angels unawares.” An angel of mercy to the woman of Shunem 
was Elisha, to whom she had shown no little kindness. When 
the seven years’ famine commenced, he recommended her to take 
up her abode with her son amongst the Philistines. She was 
thus saved from many hardships, but one result was that during 
her absence her property was confiscated. His name, even here, 
stands in good stead. On her return, and discovering her property 


330 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


in the hands of others, she went to make her appeal to the king. 
Happily for her, Gehazi, Elisha’s servant, was then talking with 
Jehoram. He had been telling him of all the mighty works 
which his master had done, and “ how he had restored a dead 
body to life.” As they conversed she drew nigh. Gehazi intro- 
duced her to the king as the Shunammite whose son Elisha had 
revived. She made known her circumstances ; the king inquired 
into her history, and ordered that “all that was hers, and all the 
fruit of the field since the day that she had left the land even 
until now,” be returned to her and her family. 

He who could not be taken to Damascus by force went thither 
of his own accord. Benhadad, his former enemy, was sick ; and 
when the king heard of his arrival, he sent Hazael with a rich 
present of every good thing of Damascus, even forty camels’ bur- 
den, to give to the prophet. He inquired concerning his master’s 
illness. Elisha replied that he might recover, but that he would 
surely die. He fixed his eyes steadfastly on Hazael till he wept. 
He asked the cause. The prophet, foreseeing that he was to 
reign over Syria and become a fearful enemy of Israel, informed 
Hazael of w r hat he should do. Indignant, he replied, “ Is thy 
servant a dog, that he should do this great thing?” But, as Mr. 
Jay once remarked, “ the dog did it.” Next day Hazael took 
the life of Benhadad and reigned in his stead, and, as Elisha had 
foretold, carried dreadful havoc into the towns and cities of 
Israel. 

At the command of Elisha, Jehu was anointed king of Israel 
by one of the sons of the prophets. Jehoram had been gathered 
to his fathers, and Joram also, his brother, was slain. Alas ! 
Elisha himself “fell sick of the sickness whereof he died.” He 
was visited in his illness by Joash, who was then king. Over 
him Joash wept, and cried, “ Oh, my father, my father ! the 
chariot of Israel and the horsemen thereof!” The phrase, it will 
be remembered, was that used by Elisha on the occasion of the 
translation of Elijah, and which had now passed into a proverb 


ELISHA. 


331 


expressive of consolation in sickness and encouragement in diffi- 
culties. Soon afterward the prophet died, and we are assured by 
Josephus that with much sorrow and lamentation he was honor- 
ably interred. Some time after his death a very memorable cir- 
cumstance occurred. It is thus narrated : “ And Elisha died, 
and they buried him. And the bands of Moabites invaded the 
land at the coming in of the year. And it came to pass, as they 
were burying a man, that, behold, they spied a band of men; 
and they cast the man into the sepulchre of Elisha; and when 
the man was let down and touched the bones of Elisha, he re- 
vived and stood up on his feet.” 

“This miracle,” as Dr. Hales well observes, “was the imme- 
diate work of God, and concurred with the translation of Elijah 
to keep alive in a degenerate, age the grand truth of a bodily 
resurrection, which the translation of Enoch was calculated to 
produce on the antediluvian world, and which the resurrection 
of Christ in a glorified body fully illustrated.” Or, in the lan- 
guage of Cal met : “This great miracle is the symbol and prophecy 
of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, there being this important 
difference — that Elisha raised a dead body without raising him- 
self while Jesus Christ not only raised himself, but gives life to 
all who believe in him.” “After his death,” says the son of 
Sirach, “ his body prophesied ; he did wonders in his life, and at 
his death his works were marvelous.” 

With what satisfaction is the review of such a life as that of 
Elisha accompanied ! His moral character bears the nearest in- 
spection and shines forth without a flaw. His powers, as deline- 
ated by the pen of inspiration, were nobly exercised, his time 
continually occupied, and his life a long discourse, both in words 
and in actions of benevolence and charity. Truly he possessed 
his master’s spirit in a double portion. His heart was tender- 
ness ; his speech fidelity, whether as used to kings or menials ; 
his death, like his life, bespake the service of his Lord; “even in 
his ashes lived their wonted fires.” 


332 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


Repose, Elisha ! Carefully the earth keeps thy hallowed re- 
mains. Repose with thy brethren, holy men of old, inspired of 
God ! Surely the world which contains the dust of those so dear 
to him cannot be doomed to complete destruction. No ; the fires 
shall purify, but not annihilate; the elements shall melt, but it 
is that they may be remoulded ; and out of the universal con- 
flagration will come forth “a new heaven and a new earth, 
wherein dwelleth righteousness” — the abode of the Good Shep- 
herd and his flock. 




XXIV. 

If A AM AST. 

SRAEL was now in a state of much depression and 
weakness because of the general apostasy of its people 
from the service and worship of the true God, and 
Syria, on its northern borders, was the common instru- 
ment of its humiliation and chastisement. 

In one of the frequent forays which marauding companies of 
Syrians had made into the land for purposes of insult and plun- 
der, they had carried away captive a little Israelitish maiden, 
who appears to have belonged to one of the few families that, in 
the midst of widespread degeneracy, had remained faithful to the 
God of their fathers. Perhaps, in the division of the spoils on 
their return, she had been allotted to the Syrian household in 
which we find her; or we may imagine the beautiful and timid 
captive exposed for sale in the crowded slave-market of Damas- 
cus, and in this way becoming a domestic attendant upon the 
wife of Naaman the Syrian. 

This man, distinguished for personal valor and for signal mili- 
tary successes which had made the whole land his debtor, was 
the commander-in-chief of the armies of Syria, and the con- 
fidential adviser of his king, to whom he stood nearest in rank 
and power. It is natural to picture him as living in a palace, 
in the midst of one of those orchards of apricots, pomegranates 
and other trees which, for three thousand years, have made 

333 



334 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


Damascus the garden of the East. But what embittered all his 
enjoyments and withered all the beauty of the paradise by which 
he was surrounded was the fact that he was afflicted with the 
terrible and loathsome disease of leprosy, so that, as good Bishop 
Hall has quaintly said, “ the basest slave in all Syria would not 
have changed skins with Naaman had he gotten his office to 
boot.” 

He appears to have been a man of much natural generosity, 
and to have treated the little captive girl so kindly as to have 
gradually won her confidence and awakened her sympathy ; so 
that, while she did not forget her own kindred and her father’s 
house, and was no stranger to home-sickness, she gradually be- 
came, in some degree, reconciled to her captivity. It was not 
easy for the natural hope and buoyancy of so young a heart to 
continue habitually repressed, and, like the caged bird, she could 
sing at times even in her bondage. 

We may conceive her to have looked on at first with affec- 
tionate but silent interest, to have seen the agents of superstition 
trying all their charms and the native physicians exhausting all 
their skill upon her master, in vain ; for still the fatal malady, 
which her Hebrew education had taught her to regard with peculiar 
dread and aversion, made steady progress, consuming his strength 
and tl wasting his beauty like a moth,” and threatened soon to 
turn that splendid mansion into a house of mourning. Waiting 
from day to day upon her mistress, she read in her countenance 
the darkening signs of anxiety and sorrow, and unable at length 
to repress the thoughts which had often risen in her mind, with 
affectionate artlessness she one day dropped the kind hint: 

“ Would God my lord were with the prophet that is in Samaria ! 
for he would recover him of his leprosy.” 

Here was a gleam of light in the midst of the thickening 
gloom. Her mistress reports the words of the little maiden to 
her husband, and as the dying man hears them, he once more 
begins to hope for life. Further inquiry increases the hope, and 


NAAMAN. 


335 


he resolves that he will try this one additional means for re- 
covery ; he will pay a visit to Elisha ere he “ shakes hands with 
the grave” and yields himself up to a loathsome and inevitable 
death. The consent of King Benhadad to his journey is easily 
obtained ; he even writes a letter of commendation to Jehoram, 
the king of Israel, in order to facilitate Naaman’s mission, for he 
is anxious to save the life of one who has so often led his armies 
to victory, and has not more proved himself a valiant leader in 
battle than a wise counselor in peace. 

We must imagine Naaman hastening with eager promptitude 
across the Lebanon, into the land whither a new hope beckons 
him. He travels in his chariot in a style appropriate to one who 
stands nearest in authority and dignity to the Syrian throne, with 
a numerous retinue of attendants, with talents of silver and pieces 
of gold equal in value to many thousand dollars of our money, 
and with many changes of those rich festal garments which 
formed so much of the wealth of the East ; and all this with the 
evident design, should the attempt to cure him succeed, of be- 
stowing upon his deliverer a princely reward. The vine-covered 
hills of Samaria and the beautiful valley of the Jordan, which 
had more than once been the scene of his military forays, open 
peacefully before him and seem to invite him onward. 

But why do his servants direct his chariot to the palace of the 
king, and not at once to the humble cottage of the prophet? He 
appears to have supposed, with his royal master, that while 
Elisha was to administer the cure, he must, like the enchanters 
and necromancers of his own country, be entirely under the 
king’s authority, and that the best way, therefore, to secure his 
interposition was first to obtain the king’s favor. It is an in- 
stance of the stupidity with which men, untaught by divine 
revelation, often conceive on religious subjects. He did not 
know as yet that, in matters of a spiritual kind, Elisha acknow- 
ledged no master but God — that this was a province into which 
Jehoram must not dare to pass, and that it would be easier and 


336 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


safer to go into the thunder-cloud and command the lightning 
where to strike than to intrude within the sacred circle where 
the prophet of Jehovah exercised his great and awful pre- 
rogative. 

When the letter of the Syrian monarch was read by his royal 
brother of Israel, its effect was to awaken in him indignation, 
surprise and alarm : “ Now, when this letter is come unto thee, 
behold, I have therewith sent Naaman my servant to thee, that 
thou mayest recover him of his leprosy.” Read with the jealous 
eyes of one whose dominions had repeatedly been invaded and 
ravaged by this very Benhadad, it seemed, in requiring him to do 
what was only possible for the hand of Omnipotence, intended to 
provoke new quarrels that should lead to new wars and humilia- 
tions. And so Jehoram, we are told, idolater though he was, 
rent his clothes, astonished by the blasphemy and confounded by 
the arrogant and overbearing unreasonableness of such a demand. 
“Am I God,” he exclaimed, “to kill and to make alive, that 
this man doth send unto me to recover a man of his leprosy? 
wherefore consider, I pray you, and see how he seeketh a quarrel 
against me.” 

Let us not imagine, however, that this was a useless link in 
the chain of incidents that were soon to have so remarkable and 
blessed an issue. We must remember, if we would interpret the 
whole of this history aright, that the highest end of all that 
happened was to bring out before the heathen, with irresistible 
demonstration, the true divinity and omnipotence of the God of 
Israel — that “ he was the God,” and that it was therefore neces- 
sary, not only that the utter impotence of all the false gods of 
heathenism for effecting such a cure as Naaman now sought 
should have been shown, but the equal inadequacy of every 
other agency than that of the finger of God confessed aud pro- 
claimed, and that the stage should thus be cleared of every 
intervening veil and obstruction before the prophet of the Lord 
stepped upon the scene. 


NAAMAN. 


337 


All this which was now transpiring in the palace of Jehoram 
?vas not long in becoming known to Elisha ; and before Naaman 
had time to give vent to his feelings, as not only disappointed, 
but cruelly duped and mocked, the prophet’s servant was stand- 
ing in the presence of the king and delivering a message from 
his master, marked by all that simplicity and majesty which 
became a prophet of God, in which he at once rebuked the need- 
less alarms of the king, and summoned the Syrian chief to the 
true place of cure: “ Wherefore hast thou rent thy clothes? let 
him come now to me, and he shall know that there is a prophet 
in Israel.” 

The words may, without strain or violence, be imagined by us 
to have been spoken by the gospel of Christ when, in the ministry 
of our Lord and his apostles, it. appeared in its full might and 
glory on the earth. Naaman the Syrian represents our fallen 
race, leprous and wretched through sin and its woeful fruits. 
Science and human philosophy and literature and government 
and the arts had all done their utmost for ages to make the poor 
leper better; but his worst wounds remained unhealed and the 
seat of the malady unreached, and when all the experiments had 
failed and all these human agents were at their wits’ end, Chris- 
tianity came with its heavenly medicines, having the power of 
God hidden in them, and said, with a confidence which the his- 
tory of the evangelized portion of our race has amply justified, 
“ Bring the leper hither to me.” 

It is natural to suppose that Naaman would now return to his 
chariot and resume his journey with more of buoyant expectation 
than ever ; for he must have noticed that the prophet’s words not 
only contained an invitation to come to him, but seemed to hold 
out no uncertain promise of a cure. There was evidently, how- 
ever, not a little in the state of his mind, as well as of his body, 
that needed to be corrected and healed. He counted much on the 
influence of the rewards which he brought with him, and still more 
perhaps on the imposing effect of his rank and style and retinue, 
22 


338 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


and expected that, as he came up “ with his horses and with his 
chariot ” to the humble gate of the prophet, he, the great Syrian 
lord, would be welcomed with no small show of deference. 

What a contradiction, then, must it have been to his expecta- 
tion, what a mortification to his pride, what a revulsion to every- 
thing that was heathen and even human within him, when there 
was no flutter or excitement whatever at his approach — no attempt 
to meet his “pomp and circumstance ” after its own fashion — 
when even the prophet himself did not come forth to receive 
him, but, remaining within the recesses of his chamber, sent out 
a solitary messenger to him with this strange message : “ Go and 
wash in Jordan seven times, and thy flesh shall come again to 
thee, and thou shalt be clean ” ! 

To get at the explanation of Elisha’s behavior at this junc- 
ture — to see at once its wisdom and its kindness — we must have 
before our mind the fact that something more and higher was 
aimed at than Naaman’s cure, even his deliverance from idolatry 
as well as from leprosy ; not only the restoration of his health, 
but his introduction into the true faith and kingdom of God. 
There was an unconscious but real and rapid moral education of 
this interesting man sought by Elisha, in all that he now did or 
abstained from doing, which was intended to secure that he 
should derive effectual and permanent religious benefit from his 
miraculous cure when it was wrought. 

Moreover, if we would catch the true spirit of the scene, and 
look upon it from the loftiest point of observation, we must ever 
be recurring to the fact that the omnipotence of the God of Is- 
rael, the only living and true God, was meant, by the manner 
and shape of the incidents, to be placed in as impressive contrast 
with the impotence of the false gods of heathenism as in that 
sublime trial-scene which had been conducted by Elisha’s great 
predecessor on Mount Carmel. 

When these principles are kept steadily before our minds, they 
shed most instructive light upon every part of Elisha’s dealings 


NAAMAN. 


339 


with this Syrian chief. Naaman had counted on deference being 
shown him because of his rank and wealth and renown; he had 
expected to be cured, not simply as a poor leper, but as the great 
military commander, the hero of a hundred fights; and he must 
therefore be taught that all men stand on an equality, as de- 
pendants on Heaven’s mercy — that “rich and poor meet together” 
here, and that “ there is no respect of persons with God.” 

Moreover, had the cure been performed in the manner in 
which Naaman anticipated that it would be done — by the 
prophet’s coming out to him, and with many mystic signs and 
incantations, and the moving of his hands up and down over the 
more diseased parts of his body, after the manner of the magi- 
cians of his own country — he would have been in some danger 
of regarding Elisha as only a more skillful and dextrous magi- 
cian than they, and the simple working of the power of God, 
without any interposing sign or human manipulation, would not 
have been made to stand out in such distinct prominence. 

I conceive that the ends contemplated by the prophet were 
further served by the fact that Naaman was directed to “ go and 
wash in Jordan.” For unquestionably it was true that Abana 
and Pharpar, those beautiful streams flowing from the northern 
sides of Hermon, which irrigated the orchards and gardens of 
Damascus, were in themselves far more pure and salubrious than 
the Jordan, and when its waters were turned into the sign and 
instrument of healing, it would induce him all the more readily 
to connect the cure with no particular medicinal virtue in itself, 
but with the power of God working in it. 

How very much those improper feelings to which I have now 
referred were at work in Naaman’s bosom, and needed to be re- 
buked and corrected by the treatment which was adopted by the 
prophet, appears from the effect which the message, at its first 
announcement, produced on him. It seemed to his still unsub- 
dued and untaught mind as if there were nothing but meditated 
slight and insult in this command of Elisha. Every part of it 


340 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


was so contrary to his natural feelings, so opposite to all his pre- 
conceived notions, that it sounded to him like mockery at his 
fatal malady. What ! had he come all the way from Damascus 
to Samaria only to be told to do this ? He “ verily thought that 
the prophet would have bid him do some great thing.” If he 
had been disappointed and chagrined at some of the earlier stages 
of his visit, he was utterly enraged now. And while the prophet 
still kept silent and invisible in his chamber, and even to all 
appearance indifferent whether the chafed Syrian obeyed his 
directions or not, Naaman had already commanded his chariot 
away from before his gate, was hurrying back on the road to 
Damascus, and all his fond hopes of cure seemed on the point of 
being wrecked and given to the winds. 

It was well for him that, at such a crisis, he had servants who, 
looking at the whole matter more calmly, saw it in its true light, 
and who loved him so well and served him so faithfully as not 
to fall in with his foolish humor or to flatter it, but respectfully 
to reason with him and persuade him to comply with the direc- 
tion of the man of God. And it was better still that, after the 
first outbreak of his foolish anger was over, he began to see the 
wisdom of their words and yielded to their faithful remonstrance : 
u My father, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, 
wouldst thou not have done it? how much rather then when he 
saith to thee, Wash, and be clean ?” 

But it is impossible not to see, in all this unreasoning and 
resentful dislike of Naaman to the cure prescribed for him by 
Elisha, a vivid representation of the opposition of the natural 
mind to the divine method of deliverance from the guilt and 
dominion of sin. And it is all the more proper that we should 
trace this resemblance, since leprosy under the Old Testament 
was avowedly typical of the disease of sin and of its consequences. 
How averse are men to believe in the simplicity and absolute 
freeness of the divine plan for recovering sinners to God ! — it so 
humbles their pride and contradicts all their preconceived notions 


NAAMAN. 


341 


of what should have been. This “ offence of the cross” has never 
ceased. Men would prefer some royal road to heaven, in which 
they should not be regarded and treated simply as sinners, but 
which should leave them somewhat still in which to glory. That 
rebellious and presumptuous “I thought” — the very germ of all 
rationalism — which would always be telling God in what manner 
he is to save men, is the resisting power that has shut the gate 
of heaven against countless thousands. 

It may be said, indeed — however much the saying may have 
the look of paradox — that nothing is at once so easy and so diffi- 
cult as the gospel method of human salvation. We shall make 
the one or the other of these affirmations regarding it, according 
as we look outward from the sinner, or look into him. Thus, so 
far as the removal of all legal obstructions out of the way of his 
pardon is concerned, and the making of a full, complete and in- 
finitely meritorious satisfaction for his sins, this has all been done 
long since in the atonement of the Son of God. The door of 
mercy stands wide open, the banquet of heavenly and spiritual 
blessings is spread, all things are now ready, and the invita- 
tion and the welcome are addressed to every inhabitant of 
the earth. 

But then, how reluctant is the heart of man to acquiesce in 
this method of deliverance, just because it is so strangely gratui- 
tous and divinely free ! We are always waiting for something 
more elaborate and more human than “ Heaven’s easy, artless, 
unencumbered plan.” We would prefer washing in our own 
Abanas and Pharpars. We imagine that we must surely have 
some great work to do, instead of simply resting with childlike 
trust in the great work which Christ has done for us. A thou- 
sand excuses and delays, with which men keep away from the 
reception of the gospel, are just so many disguised forms of aver- 
sion to it, because it tells them that u eternal life is the free gift 
of God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.” We would have pre- 
ferred penances and pilgrimages, laborious outward services and 


342 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


costly sacrifices — something that would have appeared to give us 
a personal claim upon God, and have been a price in our right 
hand, rather than to have been saved as unworthy. 

“But Christ as soon would abdicate his own, 

As stoop from heaven to sell the proud a throne.” 

Then measuring the amount of the divine benevolence by the 
standard of our own — which is like imagining that there are no 
more waters in the ocean than we are able to carry in the hollow 
of our hands — we are slow to believe what the gospel declares of 
it. The very extent and exuberance of the love, the divine gra- 
ciousness with which it comes and lays down its gifts at our very 
feet, make us question its reality. And yet, if the Lord had 
bidden us do some great thing, would we not have done it? 
How much rather, then, when he says to us, Wash, and be clean ; 
believe, and live? 

“I say to thee — do thou repeat 
To the first man thou mayest meet, 

In lane, highway or open street — 

That he and we and all men move 
Under a canopy of love 
As broad as the blue sky above.” 

Naaman is at length brought to a sense of his true position as 
a helpless leper, and we now follow him to the banks of the Jor- 
dan to be the delighted witnesses of his cure. And when we call 
up the whole scene before our imagination, we shall not fail to 
see that the prescribed measure, easy though it seemed and was, 
was admirably fitted to put to the test the simple trust of JSTaaman 
in the word of the man of God. 

Jn all likelihood he expected that his recovery would be 
gradual, and that he would be made gratefully conscious of its 
progress as he plunged on the seven appointed times into the 
surging waves. But on six occasions he has already complied 
with the prophet’s words, and each time has risen to the surface 
before his anxious and breathless attendants on the river’s brink, 
sadly conscious that as yet there is no change, and with his 


NAAMAN. 


343 


*eprosy still clinging to him like a Nessus robe. With palpi- 
tating heart he goes down the seventh time and is covered with 
the waters, and now he feels the sudden passage of a new life 
through his whole frame. He is “ changed in a moment, in the 
twinkling of an eye;” “ his flesh comes again to him like the flesh 
of a little child,” and he leaps forth upon the green sward with 
more than the glad buoyancy of youth, a leper no more. Had 
he known the Hebrew psalms, as we may believe he knew them 
afterward, we might imagine him singing, with his attendants, on 
the bank of the Jordan, those words of one of the grandest of 
inspired poems: “ Bless the 'Lord, O my soul; and all that is 
within me, bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and 
forget not all his benefits.” 

His body had not alone been the subject of a blessed change ; 
he had, almost at the same moment, parted for ever with his 
idolatry. It is astonishing how rapidly the mind works at cer- 
tain great crises of its history. We live an age in an hour. 
What a complete and sudden revolution took place in the mind 
of the Samaritan woman during the brief period of her interview 
with Jesus at the well of Jacob ! From light to darkness — from 
the love of sin to holy service and discipleship — “ from vile to 
pure, from earthly to divine” — the experience of that brief hour 
was like passing from one world into another. 

There was something similar to this in the working of Naaman’s 
mind now. He compared the utter impotence of the false gods 
with the omnipotence of the God of Israel, as it had been so sig- 
nally put forth in his behalf; he thought with glowing gratitude 
of the free, unbought, sovereign mercy of this God which had 
visited him, a stranger and an idolater, with so great a deliver- 
ance; and he returned from the river’s bank to the prophet’s 
gate the rejoicing subject of two blessed transformations, to de- 
clare his eternal and unqualified renunciation of all the “lying 
vanities” of heathenism, to avow his belief that the God of Israel 
was the only living and true God who made the heavens and the 


344 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


earth, and tc bind himself by the most solemn vows to his service 
and worship for ever. 

This brings us to notice the incidents of Naaman’s subsequent 
interview with Elisha. I regard his words, “ Behold, now, I 
know that there is no God in all the earth but in Israel,” as ex- 
pressing at once his casting off of all subjection and allegiance to 
the idols of his own Syria and of all other lands, his conviction 
that Jehovah was the one only true God, and his immovable pur- 
pose that he should henceforth be his God. 

But there is more than this in his language. He means to 
say that the matter had just been brought to the test of experi- 
ment in his own person, and that the issue had been such as to 
warrant both parts of his conclusion. “I know it,” says he. 
He had now “the testimony in himself.” In like manner, the 
evidence which is afforded to a true Christian of the divinity of 
his religion, through its divine effects upon himself, is the most 
valuable and home-coming of all evidences. It effectually “ gar- 
risons him,” as Owen has said, “against all the assaults of 
unbelief.” It is always near him, and grows with the increase 
of his own piety. “Do you demand miracles?” he can reply to 
his subtle questioner and tempter — “ I am myself a miracle. Do 
you call for evidences? — I have a whole volume of them in my 
own heart. Now I know” 

While the Syrian’s lips are thus full of praise to Jehovah as 
the true God and his compassionate deliverer, his hands are full 
of gifts to Elisha as Jehovah’s servant. “Now, I pray thee, 
take a blessing” — or thank-offering — “of thy servant;” and as 
he said the words, his attendants were ready to unload the pre- 
cious treasures from his chariot and to lay them at the prophet’s 
feet. But Elisha solemnly declines the offer, though repeated 
and urged again and again : “ As the Lord liveth, before whom 
I stand, I will receive none.” 

Why so stern a refusal, when Naaman was rich and grateful 
and the prophet needy, and when it would even have relieved 


N A AM AN. 


345 


the Durden of the Syrian’s thankful heart to have been permitted 
to give ? He had not thus declined the use of the little chamber 
with the bed and the table and the stool and the candlestick in 
the dwelling of the grateful Shunammite. Nor did Paul and 
his companions, many centuries afterward, reject the proffered 
hospitality of the newly-converted Lydia. The explanation is 
to be found in the peculiar circumstances of the case. 

With Elisha, the honor of God and the character of his re- 
ligion stood paramount above every other interest. These could 
in no degree have suffered by compliance in the other instances 
to which we have referred— they would even be promoted by it ; 
but in the present case it was otherwise. Naaman was about to 
return immediately to his own land ; his chief impressions re- 
garding the nature of the true religion would necessarily be 
drawn from his intercourse with the prophet; and had Elisha 
accepted his gift, the suspicion might afterward have arisen in 
his mind that the hope of reward had been his motive in point- 
ing him to the remedy. 

But nothing mercenary must even seem to be associated with 
the work of God. He will not allow the moral impression of 
the miracle to be in the least impaired; both Naaman and his 
servants must be made to mark the contrast between the selfish- 
ness of heathenism and the benignant spirit of the true faith ; his 
cure must ever stand out before him as the fruit of pure divine 
compassion, and never must the Syrian in future days be able to 
say, u I have made Elisha rich.” 

But there is much more difficulty found by many in satis- 
factorily accounting for the two requests which Naaman next 
proceeded to address to Elisha — the one being that he might be 
allowed to take back with him to his own country two mules’ 
burden of the earth of Israel ; and the other that, when his mas- 
ter Benhadad went into the house of Rimmon, the idol-god of 
Syria, to worship, and he leaned on his shoulder, he might be 
forgiven if he “ bowed himself in the house of Rimmon.” For 


346 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


* 

does not one of these requests appear to savor of superstition, and 
does not the other propose a compromise with idolatry? 

This has often been said, but we are disposed to judge Naaman 
more gently. The former wish might merely be the expression 
of a sentiment which is strong in human nature, and which is 
quite innocent wdien kept within proper bounds — the desire to 
have some object near us that may help to keep alive hallowed 
recollections, and that shall be as a link to associate our thoughts 
with what is loved and distant. Naaman’s aim was to have 
something always in his sight that would bring up Israel and 
the prophet and all the sacred memories of this blessed visit 
readily before his mind. And, moreover, if the altar on which 
he henceforth sacrificed and worshiped was formed of this earth, 
it would serve as an indication to his Syrian fellow-countrymen 
that while he was of the same nation with them, yet in religion 
he was identical with the worshipers of the God of Israel. 

Was the feeling unnatural or blamable, especially in one whose 
eyes had just opened to the light and whose heart was glowing 
with all the ardor of first love? Such a sentiment might easily 
degenerate into superstition, but it was not necessarily super- 
stitious. Have you never contracted a special regard for seme 
particular copy of the Bible which is associated in your memory 
with interesting passages in your own spiritual history ? Have 
you never found your heart bettered by visiting the scenes of 
holy and heroic deeds, or even looking on the faded handwriting 
of one who, while he lived, had made the world his debtor? 
Could you look without emotion on a vessel of water from the 
Sea of Galilee or from the well of Samaria, or upon a branch 
that had been plucked from one of the old olive trees in Geth- 
semane? And if not, do not blame this grateful Syrian that, in 
departing from this sacred land — the place at once of his cure 
and of his conversion — he “ took pleasure in her stones, and her 
very dust was dear to him.” 

In regard to the second of Naaman’s requests to Elisha, we 


NAAMAK 


347 


<• 

are disposed to speak with more of caution and diffidence ; at the 
same time, when we do not find the prophet condemning him, it 
will surely be wisest and best so to understand his meaning and 
design as to be able to add, “ Neither do I condemn thee.” He 
had that day publicly avowed, in the presence of his Syrian 
servants and attendants, his unqualified renunciation of all idol- 
worship. And when he. returned to Damascus, his daily offer- 
ings and holy services would tell his king and the whole city 
and kingdom that Jehovah alone was his God. But then he 
foresaw that, as the prime minister of Benhadad, he would be 
required to accompany him into the temple of Rimmon, and 
even to support his person and accommodate himself to its mo- 
tions while he worshiped there, and he wished Elisha to under- 
stand that, in doing this unwelcome work, there would be no 
conformity to idolatry or complication with it; he would simply 
be discharging a civil service to his master, not offering worship 
to Rimmon. Still, he was anxious to learn, before he passed 
from the prophet’s presence, whether this coukl be permitted. 
And we know how many similar questions have been raised in 
our times by Christian soldiers serving in idolatrous countries or 
under papal kings, and how difficult it has been found always to 
draw with delicate precision the line between what may be yielded 
to Caesar and what must be rendered to God. 

Some have understood the prophet’s answer, u Go in peace,” 
to indicate forbearance in the mean time with an error which he 
foresaw that stronger religion would be certain to cure; according 
to Bishop Hall’s apologetic words : “ It is not for us to expect a 
full stature in the cradle of conversion.” But is it not more 
natural to regard the language as conveying Elisha’s belief that, 
when Naaman discharged this service to his master, there would 
be no homage on his part to the idol, and at the same time leaving 
it with his individual conscience to determine whether it would 
not be still better to avoid even this semblance of evil ? 


J 



XXV. 

JEHU . 1 

HE curtain rises to show us the city of Ramoth-Gilead, 
embosomed among mountains, in the background, and 
on the stage a banquet, or probably a council of war, 
where Jehu sits surrounded by the most distinguished 
officers of the army of Israel. Suddenly interrupting their 
potations or cogitations, one enters the chamber whose shaggy 
raiment, appearance and bold bearing bespeak him a prophet or 
one belonging to the order. He comes from Elisha; and the 
Jews have a tradition that it was Jonah, who, according to them, 
succeeded Gehazi in that prophet’s service. Whether it was so 
or not, this messenger of Heaven goes straight up, without cere- 
mony or formal introduction, to Jehu, saying, “I have an errand 
unto thee, O captain !” And he, out of respect for his holy office, 
a gallant soldier as yet who had shed no blood but in fair battle, 
and dreaded no evil, rises at once to grant what the other re- 
quested — a private interview — furnishing no illustration of the 
saying — 

u Conscience makes cowards of us all.” 

They retire into an inner chamber. When they are alone, and he 
has seen that the door is shut, the stranger, stooping down, draws 
from underneath his shaggy garment, where he had concealed 
it, a horn of oil, and raising himself to his full stature, empties it 
on Jehu’s head, saying, “ Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, I 
1 Dr. Guthrie. 



348 


JEHU. 


349 


have anointed thee king over the people of the Loid, even over 
Israel : and thou shalt smite the house of Ahab thy master, that 
I may avenge the blood of my servants the prophets, and the 
blood of all the servants of the Lord at the hand of Jezebel : for 
the whole house of Ahab shall perish : and I will cut off from 
Ahab every male, and him that is shut up and left in Israel : and 
I will make the house of Ahab like the house of Jeroboam the 
son of Nebat, and like the house of Baasha the son of Aliijah ; 
and the dogs shall eat Jezebel in the portion of Jezreel, and there 
shall be none to bury her.” 

Having delivered himself of a message that might well strike 
any man speechless with astonishment, ere the captain of the host 
has recovered sufficiently to detain or question him, he vanishes ; 
like a conspirator against Jehu’s life, who had sought a private 
interview to assassinate him as Ehud did the king of Moab, or 
like one who has lighted the match that carries fire to the mine 
and ends in a terrific explosion, he opens the door and flies, 
agreeably to his master’s instructions, disappearing as suddenly 
as he came. And the incident I have related was followed by 
an explosion that shook the whole land, hurled the king from 
his throne, and buried him, his bloody mother, her idolatrous 
priests and every member of the royal family in a common 
grave under the ruins of the house of Ahab. 

With the bow bent to the breaking, their loyal and long- 
enduring patience exhausted, the people of Israel had probably 
got tired out with the cruelties and idolatries of the reigning 
family. It was now as with a ripe pear that drops to the touch 
— as with a mighty stone hanging on the brow of a hill, but so 
undermined by winter frosts and summer rains that it needs but 
the push of a bold strong hand, and it leaves its bed to be shat- 
tered as it bounds from crag to crag, or be buried out of sight in 
the dark depths of the lake below. Aware of this, Jehu saw the 
sceptre within his reach, and how, stretching out his hand to 
seize it, not only with the sanction but at the call of Heaven, his 


350 


GREAT MEN OF GOB. 


most ambitious dreams might be realized. With such bloody 
work, yet brilliant prospects, before him, his dreams — what in his 
more sober moments he had dismissed as dangerous, wild and 
airy phantoms— about to be fulfilled, no wonder his countenance, 
as he followed the flying messenger to the door, bore marks of 
strong mental agitation. His fellows, who saw that he had re- 
ceived some strange and stirring news, ask, “ Is all well ?” With 
cunning equal to his courage, the astute soldier at first evades the 
question, assuming a modest air, as if of all that company he was 
the least ambitious. Pressed on all sides, even bluntly told that 
he was lying, he at length, but to appearance reluctantly, and 
only in concession to their importunity, comes out with it, and 
having won their good graces, makes confidants of his fellow- 
soldiers. 

Now, as it happened in many other cases, the fable of Actseon 
is realized. Changed by the offended goddess into the form of a 
stag, the hunter is pursued and devoured by his 6wn hounds; 
the throne of the house of Ahab is assailed and overturned by 
those who were sworn to support it; the army which his son 
Joram maintained to defend his crown and oppress his subjects 
transfers its allegiance, with the facility of mercenaries, from him 
to Jehu. No sooner do the captains of the host see the sheen of 
the sacred oil on Jehu’s locks, and get from his lips the story of 
the interview, than extemporizing a throne, and casting their 
garments (Eastern symbol of homage) at his feet — rougher 
heralds than usually proclaim the successor to the throne — they 
fill the air with the blare of trumpets, and cry, “ Jehu is king !” 
So sudden and sweeping, I may remark, are the revolutions to 
which military governments are exposed, especially when pro- 
fanity rather than prayer reigns in the camp, and the army, made 
up of the scum of the nation, is officered by ungodly and immoral 
men. A striking contrast to Cromwell’s, which was not less dis- 
tinguished for its piety than for its fidelity to its leader, and the 
brilliant victories its arms achieved, such was Jehoram’s army. 


JFJTTL 


351 


Their impiety and profanity broke out in the contempt with 
which they spoke of a servant of the living God. “ Wherefore/' 
said they to Jehu, “came this mad fellow to thee?” — an ungodly, 
scoffing crew, they had no more respectful term for the holy man. 
Yet why should we wonder to find God’s servants reckoned and 
denounced as mad by a world to which his own wisdom is 
foolishness ? 

Before glancing at the part — so bloody, conspicuous and suc- 
cessful — which Jehu played in the successive tragedies of this 
revolution, I may here take occasion to observe that the true 
pillars of every government stand in the freedom, the piety, and 
the affections of the people. Nations must be ruled somehow — 
either by love or fear, by the Bible or the bayonet ; and ruled 
mainly by the former, under the influence, to a large extent, of 
moral and religious principles, what a contrast, in respect both 
of the security of the throne and the stability of its government, 
does England present to that of France, gifted as its people 
are with uncommon genius, and inspired with the most ardent 
love of liberty ! It is nigh two hundred years since that happy 
island exchanged one dynasty for another, and passed — rare cir- 
cumstance — through a peaceful and bloodless revolution. How 
many in the course of a single lifetime has France seen ! She 
seems, indeed, to keep up, like a boy’s spinning-top, by virtue 
of incessant revolutions; and destitute to a frightful extent as 
her people are of good morals and religion, how many more is 
she destined to suffer? We ourselves have lived to see her in 
the throes of five or six different political convulsions. The 
streets of her gay and lovely capital flashing with musketry 
and running red with her citizens’ blood might have re- 
minded the world of God’s righteous judgment, and how, as 
has been well said, France lost so much good blood through 
the massacre of the Huguenots that she has staggered and 
reeled ever since. 

In the conduct of the revolution which God had committed to 


352 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


his hands, Jehu displayed as ranch wisdom as energy. His con- 
duct was like his driving — “he drove furiously;” but the times 
demanded it. Dangerous in all cases when the crisis has come, 
hesitation or delay had been fatal in his. Having, by appearing 
to consult them, won the favor of his companions in arms, en- 
listed them in his cause, and so turned into partisans those who 
might otherwise have been rivals, his first step is to catch the 
bird in the nest. He must seize the king where he lay in 
Jezreel. Should tidings of this revolution meet him, Joram 
takes the alarm and escapes; so, with a promptitude that de- 
served and was likely to secure success, Jehu hurries trusty men 
to the gates with this order: “Let none go forth nor escape out 
of the city to go to tell it in Israel.” He will be his own mes- 
senger. The snake rattles before it strikes; but the lightning 
strikes before it thunders — whom it kills never hears the peal. 
And it was with the suddenness and surprise of a thunderbolt 
Jehu sought to launch himself on the head of Joram. So the 
cry is, “ To horse ! to horse !” all is haste and bustle ; men are 
arming, women are weeping, hasty farewells are said, and the 
gate thrown open at his approach, out drives Jehu with his 
chosen men to lash his foaming horses along the road that lay a 
day’s march between Jezreel and Ramoth-gilead. No stay, no 
delay; to the surprise and terror of the peasant ploughing his 
father’s fields, on sweeps that cloud of dust where chariots and 
horsemen and battle brands are dimly and briefly seen. The 
Jordan at length is reached. A moment to slake the thirst of 
their panting steeds, and at the word in they plunge to stem the 
flood, and from the other shore push on with new vigor to sur- 
prise and seize their prey. The cavalcade is at length descried 
from the watch-tower of Jezreel. One and another and another 
messenger from Joram hastens to meet and question Jehu, and 
to the question, “Is it peace?” get no other but this rough and 
ominous reply, “What hast thou to do with peace? Get thee 
behind me” — fall to the rear if you value your life. 


JEHU. 


353 


Astonished, and their curiosity, if not their fears, awakened, 
Joram and his ally, Ahaziah, king of Judah, throw themselves 
into their chariots to meet Jehu. He has been recognized by the 
keen eyes of the sentinel; “the driving,” he tells the king, “is 
like the driving of Jehu, the son of Nimshi, for he driveth 
furiously.” They meet — place ominous of evil to Ahab’s race — 
in the portion of Naboth the Jezreelite — him whose blood has 
been crying out for vengeance, “ How long, O Lord, how long ?” 
Now the prayer is to be answered ; “ the hour and the man are 
come.” 

Beyond replying, “ What peace, so long as the whoredoms of 
thy mother Jezebel and her witchcrafts are so many?” Jehu 
wastes no time nor words upon the king. The answer has 
hardly left his lips when an arrow leaves his bow, and swiftly 
cleaving the air, directed by a surer hand than his, quivers in 
Joram’s heart. He dies. The mother speedily follows, treading 
on the heels of her son. Ere another hour has come, this proud, 
painted, false, treacherous, cruel, implacable, bloody woman, 
flung from a window by her slaves, in answer to Jehu’s appeal, 
“Who is on my side? who?” is turned into dog’s meat; the 
dogs are crunching her bones on the streets of Jezreel. A 
princess, a king’s daughter, a king’s wife, a king’s mother — what 
a fall was there ! So the persecutors of the righteous, and the 
iniquity of high places, perish ! 

Jehu has still more bloody work to do, and in doing it — as 
when the lash is in his hand and his chariot goes bounding on — 
“he driveth furiously.” His eye does not pity nor his hand 
spare till he has emptied the last drop of the vial of Heaven’s 
vengeance on the house and seed of Ahab. Seventy sons of that 
weak and wicked king are living in Samaria, ready to fill the 
vacant throne, and if they are wanted, supply kings to all the 
neighboring nations. These cubs as well as the bear must be 
slain, these saplings as well as the old tree cut down, nor drop 
of Ahab’s blood be left in a living vein. With one stroke of his 


23 


354 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


pen Jehu strikes off their heads. A letter, couched in bitter 
irony, and borne with speed to Samaria, challenges its rulers, 
adherents of the house of Ahab, to set up the best and bravest of 
the seventy, that he and Jehu may have a fair fight for the crown. 
The proposal fills these cowards with dismay. “ Two kings stood 
not before him,” they said ; “ how then shall we stand ?” Honor, 
oaths, fidelity, are given to the wind. False to their God, these 
men, as may be expected of all false to him, betray their trust. 
False to their masters, they barter their lives to save their own, 
and seventy ghastly heads are found one morning piled up by the 
gate of Jezreel. 

Not yet appeased, Naboth’s blood, and that of the righteous 
whom Jezebel had slain, still cries on Heaven for vengeance. 
Another quarry has to be struck down. Two-and-forty brethren 
of Ahaziah, king of Judah, whose blood was tainted with that 
of Ahab, are, unsuspecting of evil, on their way to pay a visit to 
their cousins — those whose heads are bleaching in the sun by the 
gate of Jezreel. The cousins meet, but not in this world. An 
opportune visit for Jehu — at one full sweep he encloses the whole 
brood in his net; and while the famous character who is now to 
enter on the stage never wanted a man to stand before the Lord, 
and survived in his family to see thrones emptied, dynasties and 
kingdoms perish, Ahab has fulfilled his doom. His house is left 
unto him desolate — cut down root and branch. His sin — as, 
sooner or later, unless forgiven, all our sins shall do — has found 
him out, and, in extinguishing his family, a righteous God pays 
him back in the very coin by which, in destroying Naboth and 
all his children, he obtained unjust possession of the vineyard 
at Jezreel. 

One great and yet bloodier work still waits Jehu’s avenging 
arm. The priests and worshipers of Baal must be destroyed. 
For that purpose, and for such a sacrifice as was never offered in 
the idol’s temple, he has a stroke of policy — a coup d’etat — 
arranged, which only a man with cunning as profound as his 


JEHU. 


355 


daring was bold would have conceived or ventured on. His is 
one of the greatest, boldest, bloodiest plots in history, and he is 
on his way to carry it into execution, and so finish the work God 
had given him to do, when he meets Jonadab, the son of Rechab. 
Astute enough to see that, though he held a divine commission, 
he must neglect the use of no means, and that none was more 
likely to promote his object than the countenance of Jonadab — a 
man distinguished alike for his patriotism and his piety, for the 
severity of his manners and the universal esteem of the people — 
Jehu invites him to a seat in his chariot, greeting this eminent 
Israelite and original founder of all total abstinence societies 
with these brave, pious words, “ Come, see my zeal for the 
Lord !” 

I would take occasion from this case to remark — 

1. That there is a zeal of selfishness which, though it may 
appear to be, is not, zeal for the Lord. “Is thine heart right?” 
was the question with which Jehu accosted Jonadab ; and if the 
question be understood in its highest and holiest sense, his subse- 
quent history proves that he had most need to put it to himself. 
The contrast between the spirit of that question and the character 
of his future life is such as to painfully remind us of these words : 
“Thou that preachest a man should not steal, dost thou steal? 
thou that sayest a man should not commit adultery, dost thou 
commit adultery? thou that abhorrest idols, dost thou commit 
sacrilege ?” 

God frequently uses the wicked as his tools — when the rod has 
served its purpose, breaking it and casting it into the fire. His 
own people also have been called and constrained — I may say 
against their natural feelings — to be so. Instruments of his 
righteous vengeance, they have had to shed the blood of others 
when they would rather have shed their own — to afflict humanity 
when they would rather have poured wine and oil into its bleed- 
ing wounds — to appear men of strife when they were sighing for 
peace, and, wearied of turmoil, controversy and conflict, were 


356 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


saying, as they turned their eyes on the calm heavens above, 
“ Oh that I had the wings of a dove, that I might fly away and 
be at rest !” But there is no evidence whatever of such a mind 
or temper in Jehu. There is no relenting, no recoil from his 
stern mission, no expression of pity. Apparently congenial to 
his nature, he found in his mission the means of gratifying his 
passions, and that personal ambition which, rather than zeal for 
the Lord, was, I fear, his animating, ruling principle. We 
would not deal unjustly, nor even very severely, by him; but 
when he had reached the summit of his ambition, and leaving a 
bloody footprint on every step, had climbed to the throne, where 
was the zeal he boasted of — his zeal for the Lord ? It looks as 
if he had all along been consciously playing a part, and finding 
no further use of it, had now dropped the mask. We are told 
that “ he took no heed to walk in the law of the Lord God of 
Israel with all his heart, but departed not from the sins of Jero- 
boam, which made Israel to sin.” 

It may be that Jehu deceived himself. We are unwilling to 
regard him as a hypocrite; and it is certain that men — with a 
heart which the word of God pronounces to be deceitful above 
all things as well as desperately wicked — have sometimes de- 
ceived themselves more than the most famous jugglers or im- 
postors have deceived others. And what made it easier for Jehu 
to do so was this — that the reformation of the land and its re- 
ligious interests did not conflict with, but rather ran in the same 
direction as, his own passions and ambition. The public interests 
and his own personal objects were in perilous accord. 

Such a position is a dangerous one for any man to be placed 
in. There is no doubt to what the ship owes her progress when 
her course is up the stream, or the waters of an opposing tide 
are foaming on her bows; her moving power is evidently a 
heavenly one — the wind that sings in her cordage and fills her 
swelling sails. But the case may be otherwise. The tide, the 
current on whose bosom our bark is floating, may run in the very 


JEHU. 


357 


direction we wish to pursue ; and as in such a case we may be 
deceived as to the power that moves us, so it is easy for us to 
persuade ourselves that we are moved by zeal for the Lord when, 
I may say, we are not blown on by heavenly, but only borne on 
by earthly, influences — such as regard for our character; such as 
the approbation of men ; such as the pride of consistency ; such 
as the gratification, perhaps, of what are more or less common to 
all — humane and charitable feelings. 

“ Let a man examine himself/’ says an apostle ; and nothing 
stands more in need of being sifted, analyzed and tested than our 
zeal for the Lord. Have not men preached Christ for conten- 
tion ? Have not as large sacrifices been offered at the shrine of 
party as were ever laid on the altar of principle? Has not 
vanity often had fully as much to do as humanity with raising 
asylums for the orphan, the houseless and the sick — men, in 
what the world regards as monuments of their generosity, seek- 
ing but to gratify their ambition — a monument to themselves 
more enduring and honorable than brass or marble? And have 
not men even burned at the stake and died on the scaffold, and 
obtained a place for their names on the roll of martyrs, with no 
higher aim than that earthly glory which the soldier seeks in the 
deadly breach and at the cannon’s fiery mouth ? I do not say 
that any man’s motives are altogether pure. Such an analysis 
as the Searcher of hearts could make would detect what was “ of 
the earth earthy ” in our noblest sacrifices and most holy services. 
Our wine is never without its water, nor our silver without its 
dross, nor we less entirely and absolutely dependent on the mercy 
of God and the merits of his Son than he who, when one spoke 
to him of his good works, replied, “ I take my good works and 
my bad works, and casting them into one heap, fly from both to 
Christ — to fall at his feet, crying, ‘Save me, Lord ! I perish.’” 

Still, when zeal for our own ends and interests appears so like 
zeal for God — when the counterfeit bears so close a resemblance 
to good money that it needs a sharp eye to discern the difference 


358 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


and detect the cheat — when such as, in their natural honesty, 
would scorn to impose on others or make a stalking-horse of 
religion may impose on themselves — it behooves us to see that 
God, and not self, is the centre of our system, and that, in the 
words of the apostle, “ whether we eat or drink, or whatsoever 
we do” — not seeking our own glory — “we do all to the glory 
of God.” 

2. There is a zeal without knowledge that is not zeal for the 
Lord. “ I bear them witness,” says Paul, speaking of his country- 
men, “ that they have a zeal, but not according to knowledge.” 
Unless directed by that, zeal may be wasted, and worse than 
wasted. Baleful as when it calls down fire from heaven, it may 
prove positively injurious to the cause of truth and righteousness. 

And who can read the history of the Church, or almost of any 
section of it, without feelings of sorrow and regret that so much 
zeal has been expended on the outworks and less important parts 
of religion ? The water that might have been turned with ad- 
vantage on the green sward and grateful soil has been spent on 
barren and thankless sands, and like the lean kine of Pharaoh’s 
dream, which devoured the fat and were themselves none the 
fatter, how has zeal about ceremonies, forms of government and 
modes of worship, without any advantage whatever to the in- 
terests of piety, outraged the gentle spirit of religion, and swal- 
lowed up the weightier matters of the law ! Has the zeal been 
according to knowledge which, as if the outworks were more im- 
portant than the citadel, gave more heed to matters of form than 
to those of faith ? — that, expending itself on the ornaments and 
walls of the temple, left the light in the lamp and the fire of the 
altar to expire? I cannot doubt that the prince of the powers 
of the air has had a hand in many of those storms about minor 
matters which have so often agitated, and, but for Christ’s inter- 
position, would have sunk, his Church. Speaking of Satan, the 
apostle says, “We are not ignorant of his devices;” and with 
such device as military commanders employ when they make a 


JEIIU. 


359 


feint attack on some outwork that, while t-lie defenders of a be- 
leaguered city fly to its protection, they may seize the citadel, 
Satan has raised many controversies about secondary matters; 
his object to kindle unholy passions, weaken the Church by 
divisions, and divert men’s attention from Christ and him cruci- 
fied, from souls and them saved. 

Controversies will arise that are not to be avoided ; and it is 
also true that what the world regards as small matters may in 
the light of their consequences assume a character of the highest 
importance. Crowns have been lost and won on a narrow battle- 
field ; a small hole in its hedge admitted the serpent into Eden ; 
and solid rocks have been rent asunder by the tiny seed which 
wind or bird of heaven had dropped into their fissure. Yet 
when all the zeal and money and time and prayers we can bestow 
are all too little for saving souls, it must be a melancholy spec- 
tacle to the angels of heaven, still more to Him who gave his 
blood to save us, to see the life-boat’s crew turn away from those 
who, with outstretched hands, are crying, “Save us! we perish” 
— to waste the precious moments in angry debates on the mend- 
ing of a spar or the shape and form of a sail. 

% 

We may well believe that, and without breach of charity doubt 
whether their zeal is not rather kindled of hell than of heaven 
who are more zealous for the points on which they differ than for 
the principles on which they agree with other Christians. He at 
least presents a wretched specimen of religion who labors more 
to convert Christian men to his own sectarian views than men 
who are no Christians to Christ and saving faith. This is zeal 
for a sect, certainly not for the Lord. 

Not only so, but the worst passions have been animated and 
the most shocking crimes been committed by such as have said 
with Jehu, “Come, see my zeal for the Lord.” Paul persecuted 
the Christians, and, exceedingly mad against them, haled men 
and women to prison, compelling them to blaspheme, and thought 
the while that he did God service. Many others have done the 


360 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


like. The Inquisition, with all its unutterable cruelty and bloody 
horrors, sprang from religious zeal, of a kind. If zeal has bravely 
borne the fires of the stake, zeal also has kindled them ; all the 
difference, in some cases, between the martyr whose memory we 
revere and his murderers whose names we load with infamy this 
— in the one case the zeal was, and in the other it was not, ac- 
cording to knowledge. Excellent property as it is, when com- 
mitted to such poor earthen vessels as we are, zeal is apt to turn 
acrid and sour. We have need, therefore, when most zealous for 
the Lord, or when we fancy ourselves to be so, to see what spirit we 
are of. Are the objects we aim at, and the means we use to accom- 
plish them, such as God approves? He will not be served with 
“ strange fire ;” and repudiating all uncharitableness and bitter- 
ness and intolerance and persecution, Jesus Christ will have his 
followers support his cause and defend his crown by no other 
sword and in no other spirit than his own. Intolerance, fierce 
uncharitable passions, the bitter tongue, pens dipped in gall, are 
not zeal for the Lord, but weapons, equally with Peter’s sword, 
repudiated and forbidden by Him who, turning to that disciple, 
said, “ Put up again thy sword into its place ; they that take the 
sword shall perish with the sword.” 

3. Being on their guard against a spurious, let men cultivate 
a true, zeal for the Lord. Zeal is an essential as well as excellent 
characteristic of true religion. Dead bodies acquire the tempera- 
ture of surrounding objects; not so living ones. Hence plants 
are less cold than the snow that wraps them, and the polar bear 
lies in her icy cave with blood as warm as our own. Wherever 
there is life there is heat; nor is it till death ensues that the 
brow has the touch of marble and the body becomes as cold as 
the grave it lies in or the waves that are its floating sepulchre. 
So wherever there is Christian principle — a new and spiritual 
life — there is and must be zeal. There may be, and are, different 
degrees of it, just as the blood of some animals is warmer, and 
the lustre of some stars is brighter, and the perfume of some 


JEHU. 


361 


flowers is sweeter, than that of others; but zeal for the Lord, 
more or less developed, will be found in all true Christians. 
Continued torpor is as incompatible with spiritual as with animal 
existence, and cold indifference to the cause of Christ, the glory 
of God, the good of souls, the honor and interest of the Re- 
deemer’s kingdom, as great a moral as this is a physical impossi- 
bility — a man who does not breathe, or a sun that does not shine, 
or a fire that does not burn. Piety, as has been well remarked, 
may consist with error, but cannot with indifference ; and if such 
be our state, our usual and permanent condition, in imagining 
ourselves Christians it is certain that “ we deceive ourselves, and 
the truth is not in us.” 




XXVI. 

3 ON A II. 

T is a fact to be distinctly borne in mind that the order 
in which we have the prophetical books in the Bible 
is not the order of time, not the order in which the 
prophets lived. Their relation in this r.spect cannot 
be determined by their sequence in the sacred volume, as their 
place in it has been determined by various considerations, of 
which time has been only one element. In other words, the 
arrangement of the books of Scripture is only partly chrono- 
logical. Some of them follow each other in their natural suc- 
cession, and others do not. Jonah, for example, lived before 
most of the prophets whose writings precede the book of Jonah 
in the sacred canon. This book is remarkable as being the only 
one called prophetic which contains no prophecy. As the sub- 
ject of it lived, so the book itself was probably written, at an 
earlier date than its place in the Bible indicates. Of unknown 
authorship and disputed meaning, yet of surpassing interest, it 
stands out of the history of wars and conquests with a truthful- 
ness to human nature and a loftiness of religious sentiment that 
more than vindicate its insertion in the inspired volume. 

The prophet Jonah was to Jeroboam II. what Elisha had been 
to Jehu. Though slightly mentioned in the history, he is thrice 
brought before us in Jewish tradition, and conveys an instruction 
reaching far beyond his times. He is supposed to have been the 
child of the widow of Zarephath — the boy who attended Elijah 

362 






JONAH. 


363 


to the wilderness — the youth who anointed Jehu. His wondrous 
story, like that of Cambuscan and Christabel, seems only “half 
told.” It breaks off so abruptly that you almost fancy that a 
part had been torn away from the close. That song of deliver- 
ance, said, by some absurd mistake of transcribers, to have issued 
from the whale’s belly, instead of — as its every word imports — 
being sung upon the shore, is the only specimen of the prophet’s 
genius. Although not uttered, it was perhaps conceived, in the 
strangest prison where man ever breathed, fitly called the “ belly 
of hell” (or the grave), where a deep within a deep, a ward within 
the “ innermost main,” confined the body without crushing the 
spirit of the fugitive prophet. It is a sigh of the sea — a “ voice 
from the deeps,” audible to this hour. The most expressive 
word, perhaps, in it all is the pronoun “thy” — “thy billows and 
thy waves have passed over me.” Think of God’s ocean being 
felt as all pressing against that living dungeon, and demanding, 
in the thunder of all its surges, the fugitive of Tarshish, and yet, 
after exciting unspeakable terror and remorse, demanding him in 
vain ! With what a complicated feeling of thankfulness and of 
reflex terror he seems to have regarded his danger and his deliver- 
ance ! And how the strange shrine he had found for groans un- 
heard, vows unwitnessed, and prayers broken by the lashing of 
the monster’s tail or by the grinding of his teeth, suggests the 
far-off temple, the privileges of which he had never so much 
valued as now when, seen from the “ belly of hell,” it seemed the 
very gate of heaven ! 

But the poetry of the book of Jonah is not confined to this 
little strain. Everything about it 

“Suffers a sea change 
Into something rich and strange.” 

There is, first, the abrupt call to the Jewish prophet to repair, 
alone, and confront that great city, the name of which was a 
terror in his native land. It was a task which might have 
blanched the cheek of Isaiah and chilled the blood of Ezekiel. 


364 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


They stood afar off as they predicted the destruction and torment 
of Israel’s enemies; but Jonah must draw near and encounter 
fierce looks of hatred, if not imprisonment and death. And yet 
it was not without a severe struggle that he determined to dis- 
obey, for hitherto he had been a faithful servant of God. But 
perhaps some misbegotten dream had crossed his couch, stunned 
his soul with the noises of Nineveh, lost him amid its vast ex- 
panse, terrified him with its seas of faces, and so shaken his 
courage that the next day he arose and fled from the breath of 
the Lord, crying out, “ If the semblance be so dreadful, what 
must be the reality ?” And westward to Joppa, looking not be- 
hind him, ran Jonah. While Balaam was the first impious 
prophet on record, Jonah is the first temporizer and trifler with 
the gift and mission of God. Irritable in disposition, perhaps 
indolent, perhaps self-seeking, certainly timid, he permits his 
temperament to triumph over his inspiration. It is the tale of 
thousands who, from the voice of the Lord which surrounds 
them like an eddying wind, and says, “ Onward to duty, to 
danger, to glory and immortality !” flee to the Tarshish of 
pleasure, or to that of business which is not theirs, or to that of 
selfish inaction, or to that of a not less selfish despair. It is well 
for them if a storm disturb their course and drive them into the 
true port, as poverty did to Johnson and as misery to Cowper; 
but more frequently — 

“As they drift upon their path, 

There is silence deep as death” — 

silence amid which their last plunge in the dead sea of oblivion, 
and their last drowning gurgle, become audible as thunder on 
the summer deep. 

We have, as the next scene in this singular history, Jonah gone 
down into the ship and sunk in sleep. This was no proof of in- 
sensibility. Sleep often says to the eyes of the happy, “ Burn on, 
through midnight, like the stars ; ye have no need of me but 
to those of the wretched, “ I will fold you in my mantle, and 


J ON AH. 


365 


bury you in sweet oblivion till the morning come.” In certain 
states of desolation ther'e lies a power which draws down irre- 
sistibly the coverlet of sleep. Not in the fullness of security, but 
of insecurity — not in perfect peace, but in desperate recklessness 
— Jonah was overpowered by slumber. He slept, but the sea 
did not. The sight of a slumbering sinner can awake the uni- 
verse. But the rocking ship, the roaring sea and the clamorous 
sailors only confirmed the slumber of the prophet — even as the 
dead in the centre of the city seem to sleep more soundly than in 
the country: who hears of their apparitions? Boused he is at 
last by the master, who is more terrified at his unnatural sleep 
than at the sea’s wild vigil. “What meanest thou, O sleeper? 
arise, call upon thy God, if so be that thy God will think of us, 
that we perish not.” The God of the fugitive and slumbering 
Jonah is felt, after all, to be their safety, and in awakening the 
prophet they feel as if they were awakening his Deity. He had 
an angry God, but they had none. 

How different the sleep of Jonah from the sleep of Jesus on 
the Lake of Galilee! The one is the sleep of desperation, the 
other of peace; the one that of the criminal, the other of the 
child; the one that of God’s fugitive, the other of his favorite; 
the darkness over the head of the one is the frown of anger ; the 
other the mask upon the forehead of love. But each is the centre 
of his several ship. — each, in different ways, is the cause of the 
storm ; in each, in different ways, lies the help of the vessel ; 
each must awake — the criminal to lighten the ship of his burden ; 
the Son to rebuke the winds and waves, and produce immediately 
a great calm. 

The moment Jonah entered the ship, instinct probably told the 
sailors that all was not right with him. The fugitive from God 
carries about him as distinct marks as the fugitive from man. 
He too has the restless motion, the unhappy eye, the unaccount- 
able agitation, the mutilated or the melancholy repose. He too 
has the “avenger of blood” behind him. Who has not witnessed 


366 


GREAT MEN OF G01). 


such God-chased men, fleeing from a great purpose of intellect, a 
high ideal of life, noble prospects, from their happiness itself, and 
the faster they fled, the more lamentable became the chase? And 
who has not felt, too, that the place where such recreants were 
was dangerous, since they had become as a “ rolling thing before 
the whirlwind” of divine wrath? And what inscription can be 
conceived more painful than that which must be sculptured upon 
the sepulchres of such — “ Fallen from a great hope”? Jonah 
had betrayed his secret by words as well as by looks. “ He had 
told them that he had fled from the presence of the Lord.” And 
after his lot is drawn, he proffers himself willingly to the sacri- 
fice, for his conscience had awaked with him, and he began to 
fear the roused sea less than to remain in the midst of a drown- 
ing ship and a desperate crew. It was better to “ fall into the 
hands of God than of men.” And so soon as the victim, who 
had been demanded by all those waves, small and great, shriek- 
ing or sunk, clear-crashing or hoarse, was yielded to their fury, 
a sullen growl of satisfaction first, then a loud signal for retreat, 
and lastly, a whisper commanding universal silence, seem to 
testify that the sacrifice is accepted, the ship safe, and Jonah at 
the mercy of the deep. Even so when depart the self-stunted 
great or the inconsistent and undeveloped good, man and Nature 
seem to say, half in sorrow and half in gladness, but wholly in 
submission, “ It is well.” 

But Jonah must not yet depart ; he had yet work to do, suffer- 
ings to bear, sins to contract, a name of checkered interest to 
leave to the world. “ The Lord had prepared a great fish to 
swallow up Jonah.” As a “ creature of the great calm” which 
was suddenly produced on the sea, there appeared, emerging 
from the lowermost deep, and attracted, it might be, by the 
wondrous silence which had followed the wondrous storm, an 
enormous fish, which swallowed the prophet and descended with 
him into the sea again. We do not seek to prove or to commend 
this incident to the logical intellect or the sensuous apprehension ; 


JONAH. 


367 


we look at it ourselves, and show it to others, in the light of faith. 
Nor let any one think himself of superior understanding because 
he disbelieves it. If it had been a foolish legend, why have so 
many self-conceited fools rejected it, and why has it been believed 
by Milton, by Newton, and by “ Him who spake as never man 
spake”? As it is, this great fish doth show its back, a most 
dolphin-like,” above the waves, and floats at once an emblem of 
God’s forbearance to his feeble and fugitive ones and of the faith- 
fulness of his promise to his own buried Son: “As Jonah was 
three days and three nights in the whale’s belly, so shall the Son 
of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” 

After being thrown out on the shore nearest Assyria, and sing- 
ing his song of thanksgiving, Jonah, thus strangely recalled to his 
post, is urged again by the word of the Lord to enter Nineveh. 
A “ dreadful sound” — the sound of the sea — is in his ears, repeat- 
ing the call. Alone, and unnoticed in a crowd composed of the 
confluence of all nations, he enters the capital of the East. After, 
perhaps, a short silence — the silence of wonder at the sight of that 
living ocean — he raises his voice. At first, feeble, tremulous, 
scarcely heard, it is swollen by every tributary street, as he 
passes, into a loud imperious sound which all the cries of Nine- 
veh are unable to drown : “ Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall 
be overthrown.” It is but a simple sentence, uttered again and 
again in terms unvaried. Its tones as well as its terms are the 
same ; it is a deep monotony, as if learned from a dying wave. 
Its effect is aided, too, by the appearance of the prophet. Hag- 
gard by watchfulness, soiled by travel, “ bearded like the pard,” 
with a wild, hungry fire in his eye, he seems hardly a being of 
this earth. Nineveh is smitten to the heart. Ere he has pierced 
one-third of it, it capitulates to the message, the voice and the 
figure of this stranger. The king proclaims a fast, and all, from 
the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth. And still on amid 
these trembling, fasting and sackcloth-clad multitudes, slowly 
and steadfastly moves the solitary man, looking neither to the 


368 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


right hand nor to the left, but uttering, in the same unmitigated 
tone, the same incessant cry, “ Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall 
be overthrown.” 

We have here a striking proof of the power which units, when 
placed on the right side — that of God and truth — usually exert 
over the masses of men. As the figure one is to the ciphers, few 
or many, which range after it, so is the hero, the saint, the poet, 
the prophet and the sage to their species. One man enters, 
thirty-four years ago, the western metropolis of Scotland, sits 
quietly down in a plain house in the north-west suburb, and 
writes sermons, which speedily change his pulpit into a battery 
and memorize every Sabbath by a moral thunder-storm. Private 
as pestilence comes another, five years later, into London, and 
his wild cry, lonely at first, as that of John in the desert, at 
last startles the press, the parliament, the court, the country 
without, the throne within, and it is felt that the one man has 
conquered the two millions. Nay, was there not, two thousand 
years ago, from an obscure mount in Galilee, heard a voice, say- 
ing, “ Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of 
heaven”? and has not that voice, though clouded by opposition, 
choked in blood, crushed under the gravestone, at length com- 
manded the attention, if not yet the obedience, of the world ? 
Let no one say, in despair, “I am but one;” in his unity, as in 
the unity of a sword, lies his might; if his metal be true, his 
singleness is strength; he may be multiplied, indeed, but he can- 
not be divided. Minorities — and minorities of one — generally 
do the real work of mankind. 

The last scene of Jonah’s history partakes of the same mar- 
velous. character with the rest. God determines to spare the 
city at its crying. Jonah is angry. His occupation is gone ; his 
‘character for veracity is impeached; he has become a false 
prophet; better have been rolling in the deep still than to face 
the people of Nineveh when the forty days are past. He is 
angry, and he wishes to die — to die, because millions are not. 


JONAII. 


369 


Expecting the destruction of the city by earthquake or flame 
from heaven, he had gone out from it and erected a booth or 
shelter, to screen his head from the sun ; and he is there when 
he hears of the respite granted to the city. A fiercer fire than 
the sun’s is now kindled in his heart, and, mingling with the 
heat which the booth imperfectly alleviates, it drives him almost 
to frenzy. He assails Omnipotence with savage irony. In 
answer, God prepares a large gourd, or species of palm, which 
springs up like an exhalation and steeps his head with grateful 
coolness. Jonah is glad of it; it somewhat mollifies his indig- 
nant feelings, and under its shadow he sinks into repose. He 
awakes ; the morning has risen like a furnace, but the gourd is 
withered ; a worm has destroyed it, its cool shade is gone, and 
the arid leaves seem of fire, as they bend above his head, in a 
vehement but dry east wind which has sprung up. He faints, 
partly in pain, and partly in sorrow because of the green and 
beautiful plant, and renews, in bitter accents, his yesterday’s cry : 
“ It were better for me to die than to live.” Slowly there drop 
down upon him from heaven the words, “Dost thou well to be 
angry for the gourd?” and he answers, in the quick accents of 
despite and fury, “ I do well to be angry, even unto death. Be 
angry, yea, I could die for my gourd.” “ Then, saith the Lord; 
thou hast had pity on the plant, for which thou hast not labored, 
neither madest it grow, which in a night rose, and in a night 
perished (which was not thine, and which only for a few hours 
was with thee). And why should not I have mercy on that 
great city, Nineveh, wherein are more than sixscore thousand 
persons who cannot discern between their right hand and left 
hand (innocent as the gourd itself!), and also much cattle (poor 
dumb ones!)?” And there, to the imagination, still sits the 
stunned and downcast prophet, the great city in sight, and 
shining in the sun, the low of hundreds of cattle in his ears, the 
bitter wind in his eyes and in his hair, disappointment and 
chagrin in his heart, and, hanging over his naked head, the frag- 
24 


370 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


ments of the withered plant. Who would care to go and to sit 
down along with him ? 

And yet not a few have gone and sat beside Jonah under that 
shade of tattered fire. The fierce, hopeless infidel, who would, 
like Cain, kill his brother because he cannot comprehend his 
God; the dogmatist, who has learned his “ lesson of despair” so 
thoroughly that the ease with which he recites it seems a voucher 
for its truth ; the gloomy Christian, who lingers many a needless 
hour around the skirts of Sinai, instead of seeing its summits 
sinking afar off in the distance; the victim of vanity and disap- 
pointment, who has confounded his voice and identified its rejec- 
tion with the voice and the rejection of God ; the misanthrope, 
who says, “ Would that all men were liars!” and the fanatic, 
who grieves that the heavens do not respond to his vindictive 
feelings, and leave him and his party standing alone in the soli- 
tude which the race has left, — such, and others, have partaken of 
the momentary madness and shared in the dreary shelter of the 
prophet. 

He, we trust, arose from under the gourd, and humbled, 
melted, instructed, resumed the grand functions of his office. It 
is of comparatively little moment whether he did or not, as the 
principles inscribed on his prophecy remain in any case the same. 
These are, first, to fly from duty is to fly to danger; secondly, 
deliverance from danger often conducts to new and tenfold perils 
and involves tenfold responsibilities; thirdly, a duty delayed is 
a duty doubled ; fourthly, the one voice of an earnest man is a 
match for millions; fifthly, an error in the truest prophet can 
degrade his character and cast a shade of doubt upon his name ; 
and sixthly, God would rather lower the good report of any of 
his messengers than endanger one syllable of his own recorded 
name — “ The Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, 
and slow to anger.” 



XXVII. 

TJ Z Z I A H. 

ZZIAH was only sixteen years old when placed upon 
the throne. He must have possessed good counselors, 
for he grew up to be a man of great qualities, and was 
a wise and good ruler. He sought the Lord and listened 
to the prophets, and while he did this he prospered. The temple- 
worship was restored and the building beautified. He also re- 
built the broken walls of Jerusalem, and erected towers at the 
corners, strongly fortified. Uzziah also encouraged agriculture. 
Husbandmen and vine-dressers, green fields and flocks of cattle, 
were seen over the land of Judah. Wells were dug in desei ts; 
towers built for the protection of his borders; and once more 
peace and plenty comforted the hearts of the sons of Judah. 

His army was in excellent discipline, and numbered three 
hundred and seven thousand five hundred men. Over these 
were set two thousand six hundred captains. They were all 
armed with shields, spears, helmets, habergeons, bows and slings. 
With this army, the king of Judah set out to attack the old 
enemies of his people, the Philistines. The cities of Gath, Jab- 
neh and Ashdod were destroyed and the people thoroughly 
humbled. Cities were built to keep them in submission. 

Uzziah also defeated the Arabians, and recovered the port of 
Elah, on the Eed Sea. His kingdom was now in the most 
flourishing condition. The Ammonites, fearing him, brought in 
great gifts. His power and wisdom spread abroad as far as 

371 



372 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


Egypt, and he was feared and held in reverence by his people 
and the nations around. Isaiah, the great prophet, was then in 
Jerusalem, and said to the people, “ Come ye, and let us go up 
to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob ; 
for out of Zion shall go forth the law.” 

In the prosperity of the reign of Uzziah there were some dark 
spots, of which the historical books report hardly anything, but 
of which the writings of the contemporary prophets are full, and 
which led the way to the rapid decline of the next period. There 
was the tremendous, ever-memorable visitation of locusts. It, 
came, like all such visitations, in the season of unusual drought 
— a drought which passed over the country like flames of fire. 
The locusts came from the north. The brightness of the Eastern 
sky was suddenly darkened as if by thick clouds on the mountain- 
tops. They moved like a gigantic army ; they all seemed to be 
impelled by one mind, as if acting under one word of command ; 
they flew as if on horses and chariots from hill to hill ; never 
breaking their ranks, they climbed over the walls of cities into 
the windows of houses. The purple vine, the green fig tree, the 
gray olive, the scarlet pomegranate, the golden corn, the waving 
palm, the fragrant citron, vanished before them, and the trunks 
and branches were left bare and white by their devouring teeth. 
What had been but a few moments before like the garden of 
Eden was turned into a desolate wilderness. Joel i. 12, 18. The 
herds of cattle and flocks of sheep so dear to the shepherds of 
J udah, the husbandmen so dear to King Uzziah, were reduced 
to starvation. The flour and oil for the “ meat-offerings ” failed; 
even the temple lost its accustomed sacrifices. It was a calamity 
so great that it seemed as though none could be greater. It 
“had not been in their days, nor in the days of their fathers;” 

“ there had never been the like, neither would there be any more 
after it, even to the years of many generations.” 

It must have been in the kingdom of Judah what the drought 
of Ahab’s reign had been in the kingdom of Israel. It was a 


TJZZIAH. 


373 


day of divine judgment, a day of darkness and of gloominess, a 
day of clouds and thick darkness. The harsh blast of the conse- 
crated ram’s horn called an assembly for an extraordinary fast. 
Joel ii. 1. Not a soul was to be absent. Like the fiery cross, it 
convened old and young, men and women, mothers with infants 
at their breast, the bridegroom and the bride on their bridal day. 
All were there, stretched in front of the altar. The altar itself 
presented the dreariest of all sights — a hearth without its sacred 
fire, a table spread without its sacred feast. The priestly caste, 
instead of gathering as usual upon its steps and its platform, 
were driven, as it were, to the farther space; they turned their 
backs to the dead altar, and lay prostrate, gazing toward the in- 
visible Presence within the sanctuary. Instead of the hymns 
and music which, since the time of David, had entered into their 
prayers, there was nothing heard but the passionate sobs and the 
loud dissonant howls such as only an Eastern hierarchy could 
utter. Instead of the mass of white mantles which they usually 
presented, they were wrapt in black goat’s-hair sackcloth, twisted 
round them not with the brilliant sashes of the priestly attire, 
but with a rough girdle of the same texture, which they never 
unbound night or day. Joel i. 13. What they wore of their 
common dress was rent asunder or cast off. With bare breasts 
they waved their black drapery toward the temple, and shrieked 
aloud, “ Spare thy people, O Lord !” 

There was yet another calamity which left a deeper impression 
on the contemporary writers and on later tradition — “ the earth- 
quake,” as it was emphatically called. Amos i. 1. The whole 
prophetic imagery of the time is colored by the anticipations or 
recollections of this memorable event. Mountains and valleys 
are cleft asunder and melt as in a furnace (Mic. i. 4) ; the earth 
heaving like the rising waters of the Nile ; the sea bursting over 
the land ; the ground shaking and sliding as, with a succession 
of shocks, its solid framework reels to and fro like a drunkard. 
The day is overclouded by thick darkness, without a glimmering 


374 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


of light. There is the roar as of a lion from the caverns of Jeru- 
salem. There is an overthrow like that which overthrew the 
Cities of the Plain. Zech. xiv. 5, 6. 

It was on some high national solemnity that Uzziah — elated, 
according to the chronicler, by his successes, but certainly in con- 
formity with the precedents of David and Solomon — entered the 
temple, clothed, according to Josephus, in priestly attire, with 
the intention of offering incense on the golden altar within the 
sacred building. Whether it was that, in the changes that had 
elapsed since the reign of Solomon, the custom had dropped, or 
whether Uzziah entered upon it in a haughty and irritating 
spirit, or whether the priestly order, since their accession of 
power through the influence of Jehoiada, claimed more than their 
predecessors had claimed in former times, it is said that the 
high priest Azariah, with eighty colleagues, positively forbade 
the king’s entrance, on the ground that this was a privilege 
peculiar to the priestly office. 2 Chron. xxvi. 16. At this mo- 
ment, according to Josephus, the shock of the earthquake broke 
upon the city. Its more distant effects were visible long after- 
ward. A huge mass of the mountain on the south-east of Jeru- 
salem rolled down to the spring of Enrogel, and blocked up the 
approaches of the valley of the Kedron and the royal gardens. 
Its immediate effect, if rightly reported, was still more striking. 
As has happened in like calamities, even in Jerusalem itself, the 
solid building of the temple rocked, its roof opened, the darkness 
of its inner recess was suddenly lighted up by the full blaze of 
the sun, and as the king looked up toward it, a leprous disfigure- 
ment mounted into his face, and rendered necessary that exclu- 
sion which, on the ground of his royal descent, had been doubtful. 
He retired at once from the temple, never again to enter it, and 
for the remainder of his life, as one of the accursed race, remained 
secluded within the public infirmary. His grave was apart from 
the public vaults, in the adjacent field. 







^// /////. 


UJUDS 


York 




















XXVIII. 

ISAIAH. 

SAIAH stands out at once as the representative of his 
own age, and yet as a universal teacher of mankind. 
Whilst the other prophets of the period in which he 
lived are known only to the bypaths of theology, in 
the quaint texts of remote preachers, Isaiah is a household word 
everywhere. For the first time since Elisha we have a prophet 
of whose life and aspect we can be said to have any details. He 
was statesman as well as prophet. He lived not in the remote 
villages of Judah like Micah, or wandering over hill and dale 
like Elijah and Amos, but in the centre of all political life and 
activity. His whole thoughts take the color of Jerusalem. He 
is the first prophet specially attached to the capital and the court. 
He was, according to Jewish tradition, the cousin of Uzziah, his 
father Amoz being held to be a younger son of Joash. He wrote 
Uzziah’s life, and his first prophecies, beginning in the close of 
that reign, illustrate the reign of Jotham as well as of the three 
succeeding sovereigns. His individual and domestic life was a 
kind of impersonation of the prophetic office. His wife was a 
prophetess. According to a practice which seems to have pre- 
vailed throughout his career, as through that of his contemporary 
Hosea, he himself and his children all bear prophetic names : 
“ Behold, I and the children whom the Lord hath given me are 
for a sign and a wonder in Israel from the Lord of hosts.” He 
had a circle of disciples (Isa. viii. 16 ) — probably of prophets — in 

375 


376 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


whom his spirit was long continued. The length of his life, the 
grandeur of his social position, gave a force to what he said be- 
yond what was possible in the fleeting addresses of the humbler 
prophets who had preceded him. There is a royal air in his 
attitude, in his movements, in the sweep of his vision, which 
commands attention. He was at once “ great and faithful” in 
his “ vision.” Nothing escapes him in the events of his time. 
The older prophetic writings are worked up by him into his own 
words. He does not break with the past. He is not ashamed 
of building on the foundation of those who have gone before him. 
All that there is of general instruction in Joel, Micah or Amos 
is reproduced in Isaiah. But his style has its own marked pecu- 
liarity and novelty. The fierce, impassioned addresses of Joel 
and Nahum, the abrupt strokes, the contorted turns, of Hosea 
and Amos, give way to something more of a continuous flow, 
where stanza succeeds to stanza and canto to canto with almost 
a natural sequence. Full of imagery as is his poetry, it still has 
a simplicity which was at that time so rare as to provoke the 
satire of the more popular prophets. They, pushing to excess 
the nervous rhetoric of their predecessors, could not bear, as they 
expressed it, to be treated like children. “Whom shall he teach 
knowledge, and whom shall he make to understand doctrine? 
Them that are weaned from the milk, and drawn from the 
breasts.” Those constant recurrences of the general truths of 
spiritual religion, majestic in their plainness, seemed to them 
mere commonplace repetitions — “precept upon precept, precept 
upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a 
little.” It is the universal complaint of the shallow, inflated 
rhetoricians of the professedly religious world against original 
genius and apostolic simplicity, the complaint of the babblers 
of Ephesus against St. John, the protest of all scholastic and 
pedantic systems against the freeness and the breadth of a greater 
than John or Isaiah. Such divine utterances have always ap- 
peared defective and unimpassioned and indefinite in the ears of 


ISAIAH. 


377 


those who crave for wilder excitement and more elaborate sys- 
tems, but have no less found, for that very reason, a sure response 
in the childlike, genuine, natural soul of every age. 

The general objects of Isaiah’s mission are best indicated in 
the account which he himself has left us of his call, or (as we 
should now describe it) his conversion to the prophetical office. 

“In the year that King Uzziah died” — in the last year of that 
long reign of fifty-two years — as the life of the aged king, now on 
the verge of seventy, was drawing to its close in the retirement 
of the house of lepers, the young Isaiah was, or in vision seemed 
to be, in the court of the temple. He stood at the gate of the 
porch and gazed straight into the holy place, and into the holy 
of holies itself. All the intervening obstacles were removed. 
The great gates of cedar-wood w^ere thrown open, the many- 
colored veil that hung before the innermost sanctuary was drawn 
aside, and deep within was a throne as of a king, high and lifted up, 
towering as if into the sky. What was the form that sat thereon, 
here, as elsewhere, the Scripture forbears to describe. Only by 
outward and inferior images, as to us by secondary causes, could 
the Divine Essence be expressed. The long drapery of his train 
filled the temple, as “ his glory fills the earth.” Around the 
throne, as the cherubs on each side of the mercy-seat, as the 
guards round the king, with head and feet veiled, figures floated 
like flying serpents, themselves glowing with the glory of which 
they were a part, whilst vast wings enfolded their faces and their 
feet, and supported them in mid-air around the throne. From 
side to side went up a hymn of praise, which has since been in- 
corporated in the worship of Christendom, and which expressed 
that He was there who bore the great name specially appro- 
priated to the period of the Jewish monarchy and to the pro- 
phetical order — “the Lord of hosts.” The sound of their voices 
rang like thunder to the extremity of the temple. The pillars 
of the gateway trembled as if in another earthquake-shock, and 
the whole building within grew dark as with the smoke of a vast 


378 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


sacrifice. It was a sight and sound which the youthful Isaiah 
recognized at once as the intimation of divinity. It was the 
revelation of the Divine Presence to him, as that of the burning 
bush to Moses, or of the still small voice to Elijah — the inevitable 
prelude to a prophetic mission, couched in the form most con- 
genial to his own character and situation. To him, the royal 
prophet of Jerusalem, this manifestation of royal splendor was 
the almost necessary vesture in which the spiritual truth was to 
be clothed. All his own sins — we know not what they were — 
and the sins of his nation — as we know them from himself 
and the contemporary prophets — passed before him, and he said, 
“ Woe is me, for I am lost, because I am a man of unclean lips, 
and I dwell amongst a people of unclean lips; for mine eyes 
have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.” On these defiled lips, 
therefore, the purifying touch was laid. From the flaming altar 
the flaming seraph brought a flaming coal. This was the crea- 
tion, so to speak, of that marvelous style which has entranced 
the world — the burning furnace which warms, as with a central 
fire, every variety of his addresses. Then came the voice from 
the sanctuary, saying, “Whom shall I send? who will go for 
us?” With unhesitating devotion the youth replied, “Here am 
I ; send me.” In the w r ords that follow is represented the whole 
of the prophet’s career. First, he is forewarned of the forlorn 
hopelessness of his mission. The louder and more earnest is his 
cry, the less will they hear and understand ; the more clearly he 
sets the vision of truth before them, the less will they see. 
“ Make the heart of this people gross, and make their ears heavy, 
and shut their eyes, lest they see with their eyes, and hear with 
their ears, and understand with their heart, and be converted 
and healed.” These mournful words, well known to us through 
their fivefold repetition in the New Testament as the description 
of the Jewish people in its latest stage of decay, were doubtless 
true in the highest degree of that wayward generation to which 
Isaiah was called to speak. His spirit sank within him, and he 


ISAIAH. 


379 


asked, “O Lord, how long?” The reply unfolded at once the 
darker and the brighter side of the future. Not till successive 
invasions had wasted the cities — not till the houses had been left 
without a human being within them — not till the land had been 
desolate with desolation — would a better hope dawn ; not till the 
invasions of Pekah and Sennacherib had done their work — not 
till ten out of the twelve tribes had been removed far away, and 
there should have been a great forsaking in the midst of the land 
— would he be relieved from the necessity of delivering his stern 
but fruitless warnings against the idolatry, the dullness, the in- 
justice of his people. But widely spread and deeply seated as 
was the national corruption, there was still a sound portion left, 
which would live on and flourish. As the aged oak or terebinth 
of Palestine may be shattered and cut down to the very roots, 
and yet out of the withered stump a new shoot may spring forth 
and grow into a mighty and vigorous tree, so is the holy seed, 
the faithful few, of the chosen people. This is the true consola- 
tion of all ecclesiastical history. It is a thought which is but 
little recognized in its earlier and ruder stages, when the inward 
and outward are easily confounded together. But it is the very 
message of life to a more refined and complex age, and it was the 
key-note to the whole of Isaiah’s prophecies. It had, indeed, 
been dimly indicated to Elijah, in the promise of the few who 
had not bowed the knee to Baal, and in the still small whisper 
which was greater than thunder, earthquake and fire. But in 
Isaiah’s time it first, if we may say so, became a living doctrine 
of the Jewish Church, and through him an inheritance of the 
Christian Church. “A remnant — the remnant:” this was his 
watchword. “ The remnant shall return.” This was the truth 
constantly personified before him in the name of his eldest son — 
a remnant of good in the mass of corruption, a remnant saved 
from the destructive invasions of Assyria, a burst of spring-time 
in the reformation of Hezekiah, and, far away in the distant 
future, a rod out of the stem, the worn-out stem, of Jesse — a 


380 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


branch, a genuine branch, out of the withered root of David : 
“And the wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad, and 
the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose ; it shall blossom 
abundantly, even with joy and singing, and sorrow and sighing 
shall flee away.” 

Such was the hope and trust which sustained the prophet 
through his sixty years of toil and conflict. In the weakness of 
Ahaz, in the calamities of Hezekiah, under the tyranny of Ma- 
nasseh, Isaiah remained firm and steadfast to the end. Wider 
and wider his views opened as the nearer prospects of his country 
grew darker and darker. First of the prophets, he and thost> 
who followed him seized with unreserved confidence the mighty 
thought that, not in the chosen people so much as in the nations 
outside of it, was to be found the ultimate well-being of man, the 
surest favor of God. Truly might the apostle say that Isaiah 
was “very bold” — “bold beyond” all that had gone before him 
— in enlarging the boundaries of the Church — bold with that 
boldness and large with that largeness of view which, so far from 
weakening the hold on things divine, strengthens it to a degree 
unknown in less comprehensive minds ; for to him also, with a 
distinctness which makes all other anticipations look pale in 
comparison — a distinctness which grew with his advancing years 
— was revealed the coming of a Son of David who should restore 
the royal house of Judah and gather the nations under its sceptre. 
If some of these predictions belong to that phase of the Israelite 
hope of an earthly empire which was doomed to disappointment 
and reversal, yet the larger part point to a glory which has been 
more than realized. Lineament after lineament of that divine 
Fuler was gradually drawn by Isaiah or his scholars, until at 
last a Figure stands forth, so marvelously combined of power 
and gentleness and suffering as to present, in the united propor- 
tions of his descriptions, the moral features of an historical Person 
such as has been, by universal confession, known once, and once 
only, in the subsequent annals of the world. 


ISAIAH. 


381 


The task laid upon the prophet was difficult, the times were 
dark ; but his reward has been that, in spite of the opposition, 
the contempt and the ridicule of his contemporaries, he has in 
after ages been regarded as the messenger, not of sad, but of glad, 
tidings — the evangelical prophet, the prophet of the gospel, in 
accordance with the meaning of his own name, which he himself 
regarded as charged with prophetic significance — “the divine 
salvation.” 

No other prophet is so frequently cited in the New Testament, 
for none other so nearly comes up to the spirit of Christ and the 
apostles. No other single teacher of the Jewish Church has so 
worked his way into the heart of Christendom. When Augustine 
asked Ambrose which of the sacred books was best to be studied 
after his conversion, the answer was, “Isaiah.” The greatest 
musical composition of modern times, embodying more than any 
single confession of faith the sentiments of the whole Christian 
Church, is based, in far the larger part, on the prophecies of 
Isaiah. The wild tribes of New Zealand seized his magnificent 
strains as if belonging to their own national songs, and chanted 
them from hill to hill with all the delight of a newly-discovered 
treasure. And as in his age, so in our own, he must be pre- 
eminently regarded as “ the bard rapt into future times.” None 
other of ancient days so fully shared with the modern philosopher 
or reformer or pastor the sorrowful yet exalted privilege of stand- 
ing, as we say, “in advance of his age,” “before his time.” 
Through his prophetic gaze we may look forward across a dark 
and stormy present to the onward destiny of our race, “when 
the eyes of them that see shall not be dim — when the ears of 
them that hear shall hearken — when the vile person shall no 
more be called liberal nor the churl said to be bountiful — when 
the liberal shall devise liberal things, and by liberal things shall 
he stand — when Ephraim shall not envy Judah, and Judah shall 
not vex Ephraim — when thine eyes shall behold the King in his 
beauty, and see the land that is very far off.” 



XXIX. 

HEZEKIAH. 

LL the kings of Israel were bad men, without one ex- 
ception. And so too were most of the kings of Judah. 
There were, however, a few pious sovereigns among 
them — a little wheat among the chaff. Hezekiah was 
perhaps the most remarkable. Of him it was said, “ He trusted 
in the Lord God of Israel, so that after him was none like him 
of all the kings of Judah, nor any that were before him.” 

He came to the throne at a time when the nation had sunk 
very low. Their earthly greatness had almost passed away ; and 
as for their religious state, the people were given up to the 
grossest idol -worship. 

It was a happy day for the land of Judah when Ahaz died 
and Hezekiah mounted the throne. He began to reign when he 
was only twenty-five years old. He had been taught no lessons 
of holiness by his father Ahaz, but rather the reverse ; but in 
spite of this, he seems to have been one who had the fear of God 
before his eyes and the grace of God in his heart. Perhaps his 
mother, Abijah, was a godly woman, and her example and her 
prayers may have been blest to the young prince. 

We can hardly tell what amount of good comes to a child from 
a mother’s piety and a mother’s prayers. Many a son owes to 
them all that makes his present life a useful and a happy one, 
and all that brightens his path toward another world. Great in- 
deed is the influence of a religious mother ; her words of wisdom 

382 



IIEZER'TAII. 


383 


and piety, her kind and loving counsel, and above all, her con- 
sistent life, will oftentimes tell upon her child in years to come, 
when she herself perhaps may have passed into eternity. Just 
as a seed from some pine tree by the mountain-side may be 
dropped upon the surface and lie there for years, and then after 
a while it may spring up and become one of the noblest orna- 
ments of the forest, so it may have been with Hezekiah. The 
seed, it may be, was sown by his mother, and he grew up to be 
an honored servant of God and a peculiar blessing to his people. 

One of his first acts was to open for worship the temple which 
his wicked father had actually closed, taking away some of the 
sacred vessels used for religious worship and destroying the rest. 
Hezekiah carefully repaired the building and replaced all that 
was wanting, and then, having restored the priests to their office, 
he caused them to offer up sacrifices, in token of their sincere re- 
pentance. And all this he did so earnestly that it was said of 
him, “ In every work that he began in the service of the house 
of God, and in the law, and in the commandments, to seek his 
God, he did it with all his heart, and prospered.” 

But Hezekiah lived in troublous times. The proud king of 
Assyria had already made several attacks upon the kingdom of 
Judah : and on one of these occasions he sends Rabshakeh, his 
captain, with a letter full of boastful threats, in order to strike 
terror into the heart of Hezekiah and his subjects. Then it was 
that the simple, trusting faith of the Jewish king specially shone 
forth. He was very much alarmed both for himself and for his 
people ; but he knew that the Lord was his truest counselor, and 
he went, we are told, and “ spread his letter before him.” 

Thus his faith is strengthened and his fears removed, and he 
is assured that both he and his people are safe under the Lord’s 
protection ; and whilst he uses every possible means for the de- 
fence of his country — building up the city walls, which had been 
broken down, repairing the fortress and arming his troops — he at 
the same time reminds his people that ineir trust must not be in 


384 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


an arm of flesh, but in the Lord’s promised aid. “Be strong,” 
he says, “ and courageous. Be not dismayed for the king of 
Assyria. With him is an arm of flesh; but with us is the Lord 
our God to help us, and to fight our battles.” 

And well would it be for us if it was our habit thus to carry 
our wants to God — if we made him our Guide and Counselor in 
all our ways. What a relief would it often be to our troubled 
minds to place our concerns in his hands, feeling that where he 
leads us is the path of safety ! 

O God, teach us to trust thee ! Show us the way wherein we 
should go ! And may we ever cast our care upon thee, for thou 
carest for us ! 

But Hezekiah was a poor 'weak man, like one of ourselves. 
He fell sick , as we may; and he fell into sin , as we too are liable 
to fall ; for there are but few among us who “ always stand 
upright.” 

We will speak of his sin first. It happened that the king of 
Babylon sent some ambassadors on an errand of kindness to Heze- 
kiah. He appears to have been so pleased and flattered by this 
compliment that he gave way for the moment to a feeling of 
pride. He showed the ambassadors all his treasures, and, like 
David, he gloried in the multitude of his people and the number 
of his armies. Hitherto his trust had been in God, but now it 
was in his riches. This displeased the Lord, and he sent Isaiah, 
the faithful prophet, to tell him that, as a mark of his displeasure, 
all his treasures and his children should one day be carried to 
Babylon. 

We are told that God “left him to try him, that he might 
know all that was in his heart,” and for a moment he seemed to 
give way and to fall beneath the trial. His footsteps wellnigh 
slipped, but God in his mercy upheld him, so that he was not 
utterly cast down ; for we read that he afterward “ humbled 
himself for the pride of his heart;” and again it is written, 
“Did not Hezekiah, king of Judah, fear the Lord, and besought 


IIEZEKIA IT. 385 

the Lord, and the Lord repented him of the evil which he had 
pronounced ?” 

And now we will speak of Hezekiah’s sickness. God visits 
him with a sore disease which brings him to the very brink of 
the grave. The great king is stretched on a sick-bed. And see 
how he shines in adversity ! — how he comes forth as gold when 
placed in the furnace ! He now feels the blessing and comfort 
of prayer. He once more spreads his case before the Lord. He 
turns away from the mourning attendants who crowd round his 
bed, and pours out his heart to that heavenly Friend who was ever 
near him. God is entreated of him, his earnest cry is heard, and 
an answer of peace is given him. A few more years are added 
to his life, and a miracle is wrought to strengthen his faith. 

“Lord, I am oppressed ; undertake for me” — this was one of 
Hezekiah’s prayers. And how much there is in that single peti- 
tion ! Are we at any time oppressed ? Are we weighed down 
by trouble and sorrow? Let us simply throw ourselves on God, 
and ask him to undertake our cause and deal with us according 
to his own will. Above all, if sin oppresses us, and we feel it to 
be a burden too heavy for us to bear, let us remember there is 
One who has “ undertaken for us,” and whose precious blood 
can wash away our deepest stains. 

But little is told us of Hezekiah’s death. We may conclude, 
however, that he departed in peace. God, who was with him as 
he journeyed through life, forsook him not as that journey closed. 
His memory, too, was honored. It is said concerning him that 
“he slept with his fathers, and they buried him in the chiefest 
of the sepulchres of the sons of David. And all Judah and the 
inhabitants of Jerusalem did him honor at his death.” 

It matters not to a child of God how men may speak of him 
after his death ; it signifies little to him whether his body is laid 
in the open field or finds its resting-place in a whited sepulchre ; 
but still, for the sake of others, he desires to leave a fair name 
behind him, and to be honored as a servant of God. 

25 




XXX 

JOSIAH. 

O king came so early to the throne of Judah as King 
Josiah. At the tender age of eight years he foiled 
himself the ruler of that great nation. His father, 
Amon, had been a wicked sovereign, and was so hated 
by his subjects that they conspired against him and slew him in 
his own palace. 

Concerning the first few years of the young king’s reign w? 
are told scarcely anything, but the little that is said is enough to 
show us that even at this early age he gave proof of decided 
piety. We are told that “ he did that which was right in the sight 
of the Lord.” This seems to have been his determination through 
life, and a blessed determination it was. He had seen how wrongly 
his father had acted ; and though he probably felt that he had a 
very difficult course to take, yet he was resolved to do right what- 
ever it might cost him. He appears to have kept before his eyes 
the bright example of his ancestor David, and God enabled him 
to walk closely in his steps. 

It is a goodly sight to see a man of any age giving himself to 
God’s service and shaping his life according to his laws; but 
when we see this in a young person , it does indeed rejoice our 
hearts and fill us with special thankfulness. Josiah was young, 
very young, but not too young to be useful — not too young to 
be ranked among God’s servants — not too young to be a great 
blessing to his country. 

386 


JOSIAH. 


387 


What a mistake it is to suppose that religion is only for those 
who are advanced in life, and that it is time enough to give our 
hearts to God when we have lost our relish for the world ! Can 
we too soon begin to walk in the right way ? Can we too soon 
enjoy the favor of our Father above? May not even children 
know the Saviour, and experience that peace which he has to 
give? If Samuel, Josiah and others could now speak to us, they 
would tell us that we cannot begin too early or too earnestly to 
seek the Lord. 

During Josiah’s boyhood he was probably under the guardian- 
ship of those who undertook his education ; but when he reached 
his sixteenth year, he began to act for himself. He had looked 
with sorrow on the sad state of things in Judah and Jerusalem; 
he saw the land filled with the temples of Baal, and his people 
more or less given up to idolatry ; and now he longed himself 
to serve God, and to lead those committed to his care to serve 
him also. 

One of his first acts was to get rid of the heathen temples and 
to establish a purer worship throughout the country. This was, 
of course, no easy matter. Idolatry had got root in the nation, 
and it was difficult to pluck it up. Here one and there another 
violently opposed him, but his fixed determination to “ do that 
which was right ” carried him through. He felt — as a man always 
does feel who is doing God’s will — he felt sure that God would 
be with him and that God w r ould help him. 

But it was not enough to put down idolatry. Josiah did not 
stop there. He was anxious not only to restrain his people from 
doing what was wrong, but to lead them to do what was right. 
The temple, the Lord’s house, had long been utterly neglected 
and had been allowed to fall into ruin ; so he at once encouraged 
those who were well disposed to assist him in raising money to 
repair it, and the carpenters and the masons were forthwith set 
to work in earnest. In a short time all was ready for the ser- 
vice of God, and Josiah had the happiness of seeing the Lord’s 


3 88 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


house and the Lord’s service once more honored as they 
should be. 

And now an important discovery is made. Hilkiah, the high 
priest, on looking over some of the papers which had probably 
been laid by in the temple, finds a copy of the Book of the Law. 
This book had been written by Moses, and most likely had been 
lost or hidden during those years when idolatry prevailed. This 
was indeed a most valuable discovery, and he at once carries it 
to the king. 

A discovery somewhat like this was made in later years, at the 
time of the Reformation. In a convent in Germany there was a 
certain monk who could find no peace in the false doctrines of 
the Church of Rome, to which he belonged. This was Martin 
Luther. One day, when he was in the library of the convent, 
among a heap of books he happened to find a solitary copy of the 
word of God. There it had lain neglected and unread. But now 
he found that he had indeed discovered a treasure. That book 
was the means of opening his eyes, and led him to go forth and 
preach the glorious doctrines of the gospel. 

And so, too, the discovery of the Book of the Law was of great 
importance to Josiah, and greatly helped forward his work. He 
had not, as Luther had, the books of the prophets and of the 
New Testament, for these were not yet written ; but he had 
enough to show how greatly his people had offended God by 
their neglect of him, and how his worship might be restored. 

Picture to yourself Shaphan the scribe hastening to his royal 
master with the precious treasure in his hands, and then reading 
it out before him. It is said, “ When the king had heard the 
words of the book of the law, that he rent his clothes.” And 
why so ? Because it showed him even more plainly than he had 
seen before how grievously his people had departed from the good 
and' right way, and how the whole nation had called down the 
Lord’s anger upon them. 

Be immediately calls together the priests and others, and 


JOSIAH. 


389 


desires them to go and lay the matter before a certain prophetess 
named Huldah. She was, no doubt, a holy person, whom Josiah 
respected, and he was anxious to have her counsel and advice. 

Huldah returned a faithful answer by the hand of these mes- 
sengers. She did not shrink from announcing the truth, however 
unwelcome it might be. She plainly declared that God’s wrath 
would come down upon the people of Judah, according to his 
word, but that during the good king’s life he would mercifully 
spare them. 

And now what was to be done? How was Josiah to act? 
Must he give up all in despair ? Must he content himself with 
empty complaining? No ; he determined to do the thing that was 
right. Down went the few remaining idols in the land. The 
groves and temples of Baal disappeared ; they were all swept 
away. Then the king gathers all the chief men together, and 
goes with them into the house of the Lord. He himself stands 
against one of the pillars, reads to them the book which had been 
found, and persuades them, one and all, to join him in making a 
solemn covenant that they would henceforth faithfully and truly 
serve God. 

Such were the steps taken by this good king to restore true 
religion among his subjects. “ Like unto him there was no king 
before him, that turned to the Lord with all his heart, according 
to all the law of Moses: neither after him arose there any like 
him.” 

There were troubles soon coming upon Judah ; but God, ac- 
cording to his promise, withheld the storm during Josiah’s life- 
time. The reign of this prince was “ like a gleam of light cast 
from the burning sky before it bursts with the tempest.” There 
was a little time of peace and prosperity for the Jews as long as 
he lived; but no sooner was he gone than they fell back into 
their evil ways, and the wrath of God came upon them. 



XXXI. 

JEREMIAH. 

CARCELY can a greater contrast be imagined than 
that existing between the two prophets, Isaiah and 
Jeremiah. The one, vigorous, lofty and animated in 
his style of writing; the other, pathetic, elegant and 
mournful. There was probably something in the original cast 
of mind in these two prophets, respectively, which caused so wide 
a difference. The Spirit of God, however, can employ all the 
gifts of his servants, however widely they may be varied, and 
turn every kind of talent and temper to a sanctified use. Per- 
sons of the most timid and shrinking nature may render services 
not less important than the bold and ardent. 

Very different feelings were experienced, moreover, by the two 
prophets at the time of their special call to the prophetic office. 
Isaiah was overpowered by a sense of his unworthiness : “ Woe 
is me,” he cries, “ for I am undone !” Jeremiah, on the other 
hand, was depressed by the feeling of his unfitness; he said, 
“ Ah, Lord God, behold I cannot speak, for I am a child.” We 
see, in truth, throughout the whole course of Jeremiah, a general 
air of melancholy and dejection. His natural temperament, and 
the circumstances in which he was placed, both combined to lower 
the tone of his spirits. 

Yet he had a high charge committed to him. He relates: 
“ The Lord said unto me, Say not, I am a child : for thou shalt 
go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee 

290 




JEREMIAH. 


391 


thou shalt speak. Be not afraid of their faces : for I am with 
thee to deliver thee, saith the Lord. Then the Lord put forth 
his hand, and touched my mouth. And the Lord said unto me, 
Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth. See, I have this 
day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out, 
and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build, 
and to plant.” There are several circumstances to be noticed, 
some of them of a friendly, others of an unfriendly, nature in 
the treatment which Jeremiah experienced. 

The unfriendliness — and that of the worst sort — which Jere- 
miah suffered was from the people and their rulers. 

In the ears of the people he was continually sounding the 
alarm and rousing them to conviction of sin: “Be astonished, 
O ye heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid, be ye very deso- 
late, saith the Lord. For my people have committed two evils; 
they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed 
them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.” 
“A wonderful and horrible thing is committed in the land; the 
prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their 
means; and my people love to have it so: and what will ye do 
in the end thereof?” 

The requital, moreover, which he had from the people of Judah, 
was such as might be expected from inveterate and hardened 
sinners. They mocked and defied him, saying, “Where is the 
word of the Lord? let it come now.” He with tenderness of 
spirit appeals to God, saying, “ As for me, I have not hastened 
from being a pastor to follow thee : neither have I desired the 
woeful day ; thou knowest : that which came out of my lips was 
right before thee.” Then they plotted against him ; they said, 
“Come, and let us devise devices against Jeremiah; for the law 
shall not perish from the priest, nor counsel from the wise, nor 
the word from the prophet. Come, and let us smite him with 
the tongue, and let us not give heed to any of his words.” Even 
liis fellow- townsmen, the villagers of “poor Anathoth,” with 


392 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


subtlety conspired against his life. “But I was,” says Jeremiah, 
“like a lamb or an ox that is brought to the slaughter; and I 
knew not that they had devised devices against me, saying, Let 
us destroy the tree with the fruit thereof, and let us cut him off 
from the land of the living, that his name may be no more re- 
membered.” When on one occasion he was put into the stocks, 
there was a remarkable conflict in the mind of Jeremiah between 
principle and feeling. He felt that he was in derision daily, and 
he was almost tempted to throw up his commission and quit 
God’s service. He exclaimed, “I will not make mention of 
him, nor speak any more in his name;” but he adds, “His word 
was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I 
was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay. For I heard 
the defaming of many, fear on every side. Report, say they, and 
we will report it. All my familiars watched for my halting, 
saying, Peradventure he will be enticed, and we shall prevail 
against him, and we shall take our revenge on him.” Thus did 
he strengthen himself in God ; for he says, “ Unto thee have I 
opened my cause.” And then he adds, triumphantly, as one 
who had overcome a severe temptation, “ Sing unto the Lord ; 
praise ye the Lord : for he hath delivered the soul of the poor 
from the hand of evil doers.” 

But this persecution was carried to a far more dangerous ex- 
tremity when at length the king and the court took part against 
the prophet. At a later period (for Jeremiah prophesied not less 
than forty years) the king and his princes began to suspect him 
of treasonable practices against his country. Nor was the sus- 
picion altogether unnatural ; for, by the word of the Lord, Jere- 
miah declared that those Jews should be safe, and those only, 
who should quit the city and go over to the army of their enemies 
the Chaldeans : “ Therefore the princes said unto the king, We 
beseech thee, let this man be put to death : for thus he weakeneth 
the hands of the men of war that remain in this city, and the 
hands of all the people, in speaking such words unto them : for 


JEREMIAH. 


393 


this man seeketli not the welfaie of this people, but the hurt. 
Then Zedekiah the king said, Behold, he is in your hand : for 
the king is not he that can do anything against you. Then took 
they Jeremiah, and cast him into the dungeon of Malchiah the 
son of Hammelech, that was in the court of the prison : and they 
let down Jeremiah with cords. And in the dungeon there was 
no water, but mire: so Jeremiah sunk in the mire.” It is in 
reference to this event in his life that the following words seem 
to have been penned : “ They have cut off my life in the dun- 
geon, and cast a stone upon me. Waters flowed over mine head ; 
then I said, I am cut off. I called upon thy name, O Lord, out 
of the low dungeon. Thou hast heard my voice: hide not thine 
ear at my breathing, at my cry. Thou drewest near in the day 
that I called upon thee: thou saidst, Fear not. O Lord, thou 
hast pleaded the causes of my soul ; thou hast redeemed my life.” 
Lam. iii. 53-58. 

Such, generally speaking, were the adverse and afflictive cir- 
cumstances attendant on Jeremiah’s ministry. He lived also to 
witness and most pathetically to lament over the destruction of 
the holy city and the captivity of the people of the Lord. A 
more touching composition exists not in the Old Testament 
(a few, perhaps, of the Psalms excepted) than the book of the 
Lamentations of Jeremiah. In the third chapter of it we seem 
to behold the very picture of the prophet sitting amidst the ruins 
of Jerusalem, his countenance furrowed with grief, his eyes 
streaming with tears, and yet his heart meekly bowing beneath 
the just judgments of the Lord : “I am the man that hath seen 
affliction by the rod of his wrath.” Yet he submissively and 
thankfully adds, “It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not 
consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new 
every morning: great is thy faithfulness.” “It is good that a 
man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the 
Lord. Tt is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his 
youth.” Never did any one more need that truth, which after- 


394 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


ward was spoken by our Lord to his disciples — “ Blessed are 
they that mourn ; for they shall be comforted.” 

Happily, there were alleviating circumstances in the prophet's 
lot. A spirit of friendliness existed toward him, even in quar- 
ters where it was least to be expected. 

First, we find that Zedekiah the king — the very person who 
gave him up to death — had at different times many relen tings of 
heart. He ordered that the prophet should be supplied with 
bread daily, until all the bread in the city was spent. He also 
sent for him secretly, more than once, to inquire, “ Is there any 
word from the Lord ?” Thus he showed that even wicked men 
have conscience enough to trouble them ; while God often works 
by means of their fears, their scruples and their natural feelings 
of humanity, to protect his faithful servants. 

But the chief friend of Jeremiah, in the crisis of his peril, was 
Ebed-melech, an attendant on the king’s household — an Ethiop- 
ian, not a Jew — who most unexpectedly interested himself to 
save the life of the prophet. He went in boldly to Zedekiah, 
and said, “ My lord the king, these men have done evil in all 
that they have done to Jeremiah the prophet, whom they have 
cast into the dungeon ; and he is like to die for hunger in the 
place where he is : for there is no more bread in the city.” Such 
interference, and from such a man, might have given mortal 
offence ; but God overruled it for good, and the pious humanity 
of this stranger was afterward well recompensed. The king, 
who seems to have been an irresolute man, and easily led right 
or wrong, immediately yielded to this request, which had both 
justice and mercy to recommend it: “Then the king commanded 
Ebed-melech the Ethiopian, saying, Take from hence thirty men 
with thee, and take up Jeremiah the prophet out of the dungeon, 
before he die. So Ebed-melech took the men with him, and 
went into the house of the king under the treasury, and took 
thence the old cast clouts and old rotten rags, and let them down 
by cords into the dungeon to Jeremiah. And Ebed-melech the 


JEREMIAH. 


395 


Ethiopian said unto Jeremiah, Put now these old cast clouts and 
rotten rags under thine arm-holes under the cords. And Jere- 
miah did so. So they drew up Jeremiah with cords, and took him 
up out of the dungeon : and Jeremiah remained in the court of the 
prison.” This good action of Ebed-melech is distinctly declared 
by God to have been a work of faith. He was not a Jew out- 
wardly, but, which is far better, lie was a Jew inwardly — a believer 
in the God of Israel in heart and in spirit. And his reward was 
treasured up for him against an evil time; for when Jerusalem 
was taken, this promise of mercy to Ebed-melech the Ethiopian 
was not forgotten by God : u I will deliver thee in that day, 
saith the Lord : and thou shalt not be given into the hand of the 
men of whom thou art afraid. For I will surely deliver thee, 
and thou shalt not fall by the sword,, but thy life shall be for a 
prey unto thee : because thou hast put thy trust in me, saith the 
Lord.” His faith in God had emboldened him to espouse the 
cause of the afflicted prophet at the hazard of punishment; he 
was now recompensed with that which to every man is the dearest 
of all things — his own life. He had been the means of sparing 
Jeremiah; now the Lord spares him, while the king and thou- 
sands of Jews perished by war and famine or went into captivity. 
Beautifully is that truth exemplified in Ebed-melech’s case — 
“ Blessed are the merciful ; for they shall obtain mercy.” 

There was another favorable circumstance in Jeremiah’s situa- 
tion — namely, that he had a personal friend — one like-minded 
with himself — in the prophet Baruch. Probably he was younger 
than Jeremiah ; certainly he stood in the relation of the prophet’s 
assistant, for when Jeremiah was shut up in prison, he dictated 
the word of the Lord, and Baruch wrote it in a roll of a book. 
This roll contained most awful threatenings against the king, 
princes, priests and people of Jerusalem. It was carried and 
read to the king Jehoiakim. He in his rage, as soon as three or 
four leaves had been read, cut it with a penknife and cast it into 
the fire ; after which Jeremiah indited a second roll to Barueh, 


396 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


the same with the first, but with additions full of lamentations 
and mourning and woe. Jeremiah and Baruch were in no small 
danger on this occasion, the king having commanded to seize 
them ; “ but,” it is significantly added, “ the Lord hid them.” 

These two prophets, brethren in faithfulness and affliction, 
seem to have been likewise of a kindred temperament — prone to 
sadness. This may be inferred from the short but pointed mes- 
sage sent to Baruch by the Lord and pronounced by Jeremiah. 
We read, “The word that Jeremiah the prophet spake unto 
Baruch the son of Neriah, when he had written these words in a 
book at the mouth of Jeremiah, in the fourth year of Jehoiakim 
the son of Josiah king of Judah, saying, Thus saith the Lord, 
the God of Israel, unto thee, O Baruch ; thou didst say, Woe is 
me now ! for the Lord hath added grief to my sorrow ; I fainted 
in my sighing, and I find no rest.” The Lord then confirms all 
his threatened judgments, pleading with Baruch in these striking 
words : “ And seekest thou great things for thyself? seek them 
not.” Possibly Baruch might have pleased his mind with high 
notions, following as he did in the train of a great prophet, and 
delivering messages, although severe ones, in kings’ palaces. If 
he imagined himself to be of some importance, or that he was 
treading the paths that lead to honor, a greater mistake he could 
not have committed. However this may have been, Jeremiah 
was directed to teach him humility in good earnest. Baruch 
was required to put aside every ambitious, self-exalting thought 
— a rule proper at all times for the servant of the Lord, but 
never more so than in seasons of public calamity. Meanwhile 
the same mercy was promised to Baruch as to Ebed-melech ; 
when the whole nation came to ruin, he was to be safe : “ Thy 
life will I give unto thee for a prey in all places whither thou 
goest.” 

There is another circumstance to be noted in the history of 
Jeremiah, proving how gracious the Lord can show himself to 
his devoted servants. When the king of Babylon had taken 


JEREMIAH. 


397 


Jerusalem, it is related that he “gave charge concerning Jere- 
miah to Nebuzar-adan, the captain of the guard, saying, Take 
him, and look well to him, and do him no harm; but do unto 
him even as he shall say unto thee.” And, consequently, “all 
the king of Babylon’s princes” interested themselves about this 
poor prophet: “Even they sent and took Jeremiah out of the 
court of the prison, and committed him unto Gedaliah the son of 
Ahikam the son of Shaphan, that he should carry him home : so 
he dwelt among the people.” The Lord made him to be pitied 
of all those that carried away the nation captive into Babylon. 

Concerning the writings of Jeremiah, it may be observed that, 
having originally been addressed to backsliding Israel, they are 
peculiarly adapted to comfort, restore and establish those who for 
a season have departed from the Lord, but are longing to return 
to him. This book and the prophecy of Hosea together form a 
treasury inexpressibly valuable and consolatory to penitent back- 
sliders. 

We may observe further that it would be a great error to im- 
pute to Jeremiah anything like pusillanimity ; so far from it, he 
was on all proper occasions remarkable for courage. Nowhere 
shall we find more energetic descriptions of what a prophet ought 
to be than in the twenty-third chapter of his prophecy ; and what 
he described, he himself was. “ Mine heart within me,” he says,. 
“ is broken because of the prophets ; all my bones shake.” Then, 
challenging these blind guides of Israel, he bursts out into the 
noblest language of encouragement, urging himself and all like- 
minded with him faithfully to discharge their arduous duties: 
“ The prophet that hath a dream, let him tell a dream ; and he 
that hath my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What is 
the chaff to the wheat? saith the Lord. Is not my word like as 
a fire? saith the Lord; and like a hammer that breaketh the 
rock in pieces?” 



XXXII. 

EZEKIEL. 

HO dare claim kindred with Ezekiel, the severe, the 
mystic, the unfathomable, the lonely, whose hot, hur- 
ried breath we feel approaching us like the breath of 
a furnace? Perhaps the eagle may, for his eye was as 
keen and as fierce as hers. Perhaps the lion may, for his voice, 
too, sounded vast and hollow on the wilderness wind. Perhaps 
the wild ass may, for his step was, like hers, incontrollable. Or 
does he not turn away proudly from all these, and looking up, 
demand as associates the most fervid of the burning ones — those 
who, of the angelic throng, stand the nearest, and yet blench the 
least, before the throne of God ? Does he not cry, as he sees the 
seven angels holding the seven last vials of divine wrath, and 
coming forth from the “ smoke of the glory of God,” “ These are 
my brethren be mine to mingle with them, to be clean as 
these, and to bear a like “ vessel of the Lord ” with these ? Does 
he not wish to stand apart even from Isaiah, Daniel, Habakkuk 
and John? 

The comparison of a comet, often used and generally wasted, 
is strikingly applicable to Ezekiel. Sharp, distinct, yet nebu- 
lous, swift, sword-shaped, blood-red, he hangs in the Old Testa- 
ment sky, rather burning as a portent than shining as a prophet. 
It is not his magnitude or solidity, so much as his intensity and 
strangeness, which astonish you. It is not the amount of light 
he gives which you value so much, as the heat, the excitement 

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EZEKIEL. 


399 


and the curiosity which he produces. “ From what depths, mys- 
terious stranger, hast thou come? what are the tidings of thy 
shadowed yet fiery beams? and whither art thou bound?” are 
inevitable questions to ask at him, although the answers have not 
yet fully arrived. He is a treasury of gold and gems, but triple- 
barred, and guarded by watching seraphim. 

The comet, then, is but a fiery sword protecting a system be- 
hind it. To burst beyond a boundary so sternly fixed, and 
expound the heights and depths of his meaning, is not our pur- 
pose. We shall be satisfied if we can catch the outline of the 
guardian shape. 

Mark, first, the lofty and visionary groundwork of his prophecy. 
Tt is the record of a succession of trances. The prophet usually 
hangs high between earth and the regions of the ethereal. A 
scenery gigantic as that of dreams, select as that of pictures, rich 
as that of fancy and distinct as that of nature surrounds his 
motions and swims before his eye. The shapes which he had 
seen in the temple come back upon his captive vision, but come 
back altered in form, enlarged in size and shining in the radiance 
of Ihe divine glory. How terrific the composite of the four living 
creatures, with their four faces and wings, seen amid a confusion 
of light and darkness, of still fire and leaping lightnings, of bur- 
nished brass and burning coals, coupled with the high rings of 
the eyed wheels, unified by the spirit moving in them all, over- 
hung by the terrible crystal of a firmament, and that again by 
the sapphire throne, and that again by the similitude of a man 
seated upon it, surrounded, as they pursue their strait, stern path, 
by the girdle of a rainbow, which softens the fiery storm, and 
moving to the music of a multitude of waters, “ as the noise of 
a host,” which is commanded from above by a mightier, solitary 
voice — the voice of the Eternal ! What pencil can represent to 
us the glory of this apparition ? or who but one whose brow had 
been made adamant and whose eye had been cleansed with light- 
ning could have faced it as it passed? Or shall we look at the 


400 


GREAT MEN OF GOB . 


prophet again, seized by the form of a man’s hand, lifted up by 
a lock of his hair between earth and heaven, and brought from 
Chebar to Jerusalem? or shall we follow him as he passes down 
the deepening abominations of his country? or shall we witness 
with him the man clothed with linen baptizing Jerusalem with 
fire? or shall we descend after him into that nameless valley, full 
of dry bones ? or shall we take our stand beside him on that high 
hill, higher far than that of Mirza’s vision, or than any peak in 
the Delectable Mountains, and see the great city on the south, or 
hear the rush of the holy waters, encompassing the earth? — 
visions these, for which the term “ sublime” is lowly, and the 
term “ poetic” poor. From heaven, in some clear future day, 
might be expected to fall down at once the epithets which can 
express their glory and the light which can explain their 
meaning. 

We mark, next, besides his visions, a singular abundance and 
variety of typical acts and attitudes. Now he eats a roll of a 
deadly sweetness. Now he enacts a mimic siege against a tile 
representing Jerusalem. Now he shaves his beard and hair, 
burns a third part in the fire, smites a third part with a knife, 
scatters a third part to the winds, reserving only a few hairs as 
a remnant. Now he makes and shows a chain, as the worthy 
recompense of an evil and an insane generation. Now he pre- 
pares stuff for removing, and brings it out day after day in the 
sight of all. Now he stands with bread and water in his hands, 
but with bread, Avater, hands, body and head trembling, as if in 
some unheard storm, as a sign of coming tremors and tempests 
among his people. And now — sad necessity ! — the desire of his 
eyes — his wife — is taken aAvay by a stroke; yet God’s seal is set 
upon his lips, forbidding him to mourn. It was the sole link 
binding him to earth, and, once broken, he becomes loosened 
and free as a column of smoke separated from the sacrifice and 
gilded into flame by the setting sun. 

Such types suited the ardent temperament of the East. They 


EZEKIEL. 


401 


were its best oratorical gestures. They expressed what the, 
waving of hands, the bending of knees and the beating of breasts 
could not fully do. They were solidified figures. Modern ages 
can show nothing equal or similar, for Burke’s dagger must, by 
universal consent, be sheathed. But still the roll, the tile, the 
hair, the chain, the quaking bread and water of Ezekiel shall be 
preserved as specimens of an extinct tongue, the strangest and 
strongest ever spoken on earth. 

We mark, next, with all critics, a peculiar boldness of spirit 
and vehemence of language. How can he fear man who had 
trembled not in the presence of visions the report of which on 
his page is yet able to bristle the hair and chill the blood? 
Thrown into heaven’s heat, as into a furnace, he comes forth 
indurated to suffering and to shame — his face a flint, his “ brow 
adamant,” his eye a coal of supernatural fire. Ever afterward 
his style seems hurrying in chase of the “wheels,” and his colors 
of speech are changing and gorgeous as the light which sur- 
rounded them. The first vision seen on Chebar’s banks becomes 
his ideal, and all his after-predictions either reach, or aim at 
reaching, its glory. A certain rough power, too, distinguishes 
many of his chapters. He is “ naked, and is not ashamed.” As 
he felt bound to give a severe and literal transcript of the “ things 
in heaven” which he saw, he conceives himself bound also lite- 
rally to transcribe the things of earth and hell. 

Notwithstanding this impetuosity, there comes sometimes across 
his jet-black lyre, with its fiery strings, a soft, beautiful music, 
which sounds more sweetly and strangely from the medium it 
has found. It is not pathos, but elegant beauty, reposing amid 
rude strength, like a finished statue found in an aboriginal cave. 
There is, for instance, a picture in the sixteenth chapter which a 
high judge calls the “most delicately beautiful in the written 
language of men”: “Then washed I thee with water; yea, I 
thoroughly washed away thy blood from thee, and I anointed 
thee with oil. I clothed thee also with broidered work, and shod 
26 


402 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


thee with badgers’ skin, and I girded thee about with fine linen, 
and I covered thee with silk. I decked thee also with orna- 
ments, and I put bracelets upon thy hands, and a chain on thy 
neck. And I put a jewel on thy forehead, and ear-rings in thine 
ears, and a beautiful crown upon thine head. Thus wast thou 
decked with gold and silver, and thy raiment was of fine linen, 
and silk, and broidered work; thou didst eat fine flour, and 
honey, and oil : and thou wast exceeding beautiful, and thou 
didst prosper into a kingdom. And thy renown went forth 
among the heathen for thy beauty : for it was perfect through 
my comeliness, which I had put upon thee, saith the Lord God.” 
This seems a fragment of Solomon’s Song; it is a jewel dropped 
from the forehead of his u spouse,” and acts as a foil to the fear- 
ful minuteness of description which characterizes the rest of the 
chapter. In this point of his genius Ezekiel resembles Dante. 
Like Dante, he loves the terrible; but like Dante, too, the 
beautiful seems to love him. 

Sprinkled, besides, amid the frequent grandeurs and rare 
beauties of his book, are practical appeals of close and cogent 
force. Such, for instance, are his picture of a watchman’s duty, 
his parable of sour grapes, his addresses at various times to the 
shepherds, to the elders and to the people of Israel. From dim 
imaginative heights, he comes do\yn, like Moses from the dark- 
ness of Sinai, with face shining and foot stamping out indigna- 
tion against a guilty people who thought him lost upon his 
aerial altitudes. He is at once the most poetical and practical 
of preachers. This paradox has not unfrequently been exempli- 
fied in the history of preaching, as the names of Chrysostom, 
Taylor, Howe, Hall and Chalmers can testify. He who is able 
to fly upward is able to return, and with tenfold impetus, from 
his flight. The poet, too, has an intuitive knowledge of the 
springs of human nature which no study and no experience can 
fully supply, and which enables him, when he turns from his 
visions to the task, to “ pierce to the dividing asunder of soul 


EZEKIEL. 


403 


and spirit, of the joints and marrow,” and to become a “ dis- 
cerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” In Ezekiel’s 
prophecy we find visions and practical exhortations almost 
equally blended — the dark and the clear alternate, and produce 
a fine chiar-oscuro, like 

“That beautiful uncertain weather, 

Where gloom and glory meet together.” 

On the range of prophetic mountains, overlooking the pagan 
lands, Ezekiel, like his brethren, has a summit, and a dark and 
high summit it is. The fire which he flings abroad from it comes 
from a “ furnace heated seven times hotter” than that of the rest. 
He dallies with the destruction of Israel’s foes ; he “ rolls it as a 
sweet morsel under his tongue he protracts the fierce luxury ; 
he throws it out into numerous imaginative shapes, that he may 
multiply his pleasure. He sings in the ear of one proud op- 
pressor the fate of a former as the forerunner of his own. He 
mingles a bitter irony with his denunciations. He utters, for 
example, a lamentation over Egypt ; and such a lamentation ! — a 
lamentation without sorrow, nay, full of exulting and trampling 
gladness. And at last, opening the wide mouth of Hades, he 
throws in — “ heaps upon heaps” — all Israel’s enemies — Pharaoh, 
Elam, Mesheeh, Tubal, Edom, the Zidonians — in “ruin recon- 
ciled,” and with a shout of laughter leaves them massed together 
in one midnight of common destruction. 

Ezekiel was a priest as well as a prophet, and alludes more 
frequently than any of the prophets to the ceremonial institutes 
of the temple. He was every inch a Jew; and none of the 
prophets possessed more attachment to their country, more zeal 
for their law and more hatred to its foes. It is not enough for 
him to predict the ruin of Zion’s present enemies ; he must spring 
forward into the future, organize and bring up from the far north 
a shadowy army of enemies — Gog and Magog — against the moun- 
tains of Israel, and please his insatiate spirit of patriotism by 
whelming them also in a vaster and a final doom. And leaving 


404 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


them to their “ seven months’ burial,” he hurries away, in the 
hand of God, to the very high mountain, where, in place of the 
fallen temple and deserted streets of Jerusalem, the new city, the 
new temple and the new country of the prince appear before his 
view, and comfort him, under the darkness of the present, by the 
transcendent glories of the future hovering over the history of 
his beloved people. 

Such a being was Ezekiel — among men, but not of them — 
detained in the company of flesh, his feet on earth, his soul float- 
ing amid the cherubim. We have tried to describe him ; but 
perhaps it had been our wisdom to have said only, as he heard 
it said to an object representing well the swiftness, strength and 
impetuosity of his own spirit — “ O wheel !” 

Amplification is asserted, by Eichhorn and others, to be the 
peculiarity of Ezekiel. It was as truly asserted by Hall to be 
the differentia of Burke. He no doubt describes minutely the 
objects before him, but this because, more than other prophets, 
he had objects visually presented, complicated and minute to de- 
scribe. But his description of them is always terse and succinct ; 
indeed, the stern literality with which he paints ideal and spirit- 
ual figures is one cause of his obscurity. He never deals with 
his visions artistically or by selection, but seems simply to turn 
his soul out before us, to photograph the dimmest of his dreams. 
Thus, too, Burke, from the vividness of his imagination, seems 
often to be rhetorically expanding and exaggerating, while, in 
fact, he is but severely copying from the large pictures which 
have arisen before his view. 

We know little of this prophet’s history ; it is marked chiefly 
by the procession of his predictions as during twenty-one years 
they marched onward to the mountain-top, where they were 
abruptly closed. But we cannot successfully check our fancy as 
she seeks to represent to us the face and figure of this favorite 
prophet. We see him young, slender, long-locked, stooping as 
if under the burden of the Lord, with a visible fire in his eye 


EZEKIEL. 


405 


and cheek and an invisible fire about his motions and gestures, 
an earnest purpose pursuing him like a ghost, a wild beauty 
hanging around him like the blossom on the thorn tree, and the 
air of early death adding a supernatural age and dignity to his 
youthful aspect. We see him, as he moved through the land, a 
sun-gilded storm, followed by looks of admiration, wonder and 
fear, and unterrified by the counsel of elders, undismayed by 
danger or by death, climbing straight to his object. We see him 
at last on the mount of vision — the Pisgali of prophecy — with 
rapturous wonder saluting the spectacle of the mystic city and 
the holy waters. Then the burning soul exhales through the 
burning eyes, and the wearied body falls down in his own soli- 
tary chamber; for it had been indeed a “ dream, ” but a dream 
true as are the future reign of Jesus and the future glory of the 
city and Church of God. 

JEWISH HYMN IN BABYLON. 

O’er Judah’s land thy thunders broke, O Lord ! 

The chariots rattled o’er her sunken gate, 

Her sons were wasted by the Assyrian sword, 

E’en her foes wept to see her fallen state; 

And heaps her ivory palaces became, 

Her princes wore the captive’s garb of shame, 

Her temple sank amid the smouldering flame, 

For thou didst ride the tempest-cloud of fate. 

O’er Judah’s land thy rainbow, Lord, shall beam, 

And the sad city lift her crownless head; 

And songs shall wake, and dancing footsteps gleam, 

Where broods o’er fallen streets the silence of the dead. 

The sun shall shine on Salem’s gilded towers, 

On Carmel’s side our maidens cull the flowers, 

To deck, at blushing eve, their bridal bowers, 

And angel feet the glittering Sion tread. 

Thy vengeance gave us to the stranger’s hand, 

And Abraham’s children were led forth for slaves; 

With fetter’d steps we left our pleasant land, 

Envying our fathers in their peaceful graves. 


406 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


The stranger’s bread with bitter tears we steep, 

And when our weary eyes should sink to sleep, 

’Neath the mute midnight we steal forth to weep, 

Where the pale willows shade Euphrates’ waves. 

The born in sorrow shall bring forth in joy ; 

Thy mercy, Lord, shall lead thy children home ; 

He that went forth a tender yearling boy, 

Yet, ere he die, to Salem’s streets shall come. 

And Canaan’s vines for us their fruits shall bear, 

And Hermon’s bees their honeyed stores prepare; 

And we shall kneel again in thankful prayer, 

Where, o’er the cherub-seated God, full blazed the irradiate dome, 

Milman. 



XXXIII. 

DANIEL. 


LIJAH, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, with other of the great seers 
of the Old Testament, were prophets and little else, 
Daniel belongs to a different order of men. He was 
chief counselor in a great empire. They seem to have 
been poor, solitary and wandering men, despised and rejected ; 
he was the favorite of monarchs. Their predictions exposed 
them to danger and shame; his “dreams” drew him aloft to 
riches and honor. They were admitted now and then among 
princes because they were prophets, but his power of prophecy 
made him a prince. Their predictions came generally naked to 
their waking eyes — they were day-dreams — but his were often 
softened and shaded by the mist of sleep. And yet we feel justi- 
fied in putting the well-conditioned and gold-hung Daniel beside 
the gaunt, hungry and wild-eyed sons of the prophets. Souls, 
and dark piercing eyes expressing similar souls, are kindred, 
whether they burn beneath the brows of beggars or of kings. 

“ Sleep on,” said an unhappy literary man over the dust of 
Bunyan, in Bunhill-fields, “ thou prince of dreamers.” Prince 
the third he was; for while Joseph is the first, Daniel is the 
second, monarch in this dim dynasty. His pillow was at times a 
throne — the throne of his genius, the throne of empires and of all 
future ages. His imagination, fettered during the day by the 
cares of state, launched out at night into the sea of futurity, and 

brought home, from its remotest shores, spoils of which we are 

407 



408 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


only yet learning the value and the meaning. It was by under- 
standing the cipher of his own dreams that he learned to expound 
that of others. As the poet is the best, nay, only true, critic of 
poetry — as the painter can best understand pictures, and the 
orator best appreciate, whoever else may feel, eloquence — the 
dreamer alone can expound dreams. 

“A dream is from God” is one of the earliest, shortest and 
truest of sentences. Strange, stuttering, imperfect, but real and 
direct messengers from the Infinite, are our dreams. Like worn- 
out couriers, dying with their news at the threshold of the door, 
dreams seem sometimes unable to utter their tidings. Or is it 
rather that we do not yet understand their language, and must 
often thus lay missives aside which contain at once our duty and 
our destiny? The dreaming world — as the region where all ele- 
ments are mingled, all contradictions reconciled, all tenses lost 
in one — supplies us with the only faint conception we have of 
that awful NOW in which the Eternal dwells. In every dream 
does not the soul, like a stream, sink transiently into the dee]) 
abyss whence it came, and where it is to merge at death ? and 
are not the confusion and incoherence of dreams just the hubbub, 
the foam and the struggle with which the river weds the ocean ? 

But all dreams which ever waved rapture over the brow of 
youthful genius, dreaming of love or heaven, or which ever dis- 
tilled poison on the ^drugged and desperate repose of unhappy 
bard or philosopher who has experienced the “ pains of sleep,” 
or cried aloud, as he awoke in struggles, “ I shall sleep no more,” 
must yield in magnitude, grandeur and comprehensiveness to the 
dreams which Daniel expounded or saw. They are all colossal 
in size, as befitted dreams dreamed in the palace of Babylon. 

Let us look at the history of this great and almost faultless 
man. From out of the crowd of Jewish captives whom Nebu- 
chadnezzar, after the conquest of Palestine, carried to Babylon, 
he caused a certain number of youths of highest rank, among 
whom was Daniel, who was of the royal line, to be selected, in 


DANIEL. 


409 


order that, after being educated in the palace, and instructed in 
all the learning of the times, they might be employed in services 
about his person. Being furnished, as was customary, with ricli 
viands from the royal table, of which, however, they could not 
partake without violating the ceremonial law which God had 
imposed upon his people, Daniel applied for, and, not without 
some difficulty and hazard, obtained, permission for himself and 
his companions to use coarser food, and thenceforth voluntarily 
submitted to a course of life rigidly abstemious, that he might 
not disobey the commands of Heaven. Having early distin- 
guished himself by his singular progress in learning, so that he 
speedily came to be ranked in the class of the wise or learned 
men of the country, and having recommended himself to those 
about him by the strict propriety of his conduct, he was soon 
furnished with an opportunity of displaying attainments of a 
higher order than any which human favor or skill can bestow. 
Nebuchadnezzar, having been visited with one of those visions of 
the night by means of which the omniscient God, in times pre- 
vious to the gospel revelation, was wont to evince his providence 
and supreme administration, sought relief from the agitation into 
which the prophetic dream had plunged his proud spirit by de- 
manding, with threats, from his wise men, not only an interpre- 
tation of the dream, but a relation of its circumstances, which, in 
the perturbed state of his mind, had escaped from his memory. 
In the denunciations of death which the infuriated monarch 
issued against those from whom he hoped to extort this super- 
human information, Daniel with his companions was involved ; 
and having obtained, by his prayers, from Him who alone could 
give it, a revelation of the mysterious vision, he was enabled to 
recall to Nebuchadnezzar’s recollection the particulars of it, and 
to furnish the interpretation, accompanying his disclosures with 
a faithful and fearless exhortation to the monarch to acknowledge 
the supremacy of that God to whose inspiration alone Daniel 
ascribed his knowledge of the mystery. 


410 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


On a subsequent occasion of a similar kind, Daniel, now ad- 
vanced to high rank in the state, was called upon to declare to 
the same sovereign the decree of the Most High which had gone 
forth against him, that for his arrogant usurpation of the divine 
prerogative, and refusal to acknowledge the one living and true 
God, he should for a time be deprived of reason, and degraded 
from the height of his grandeur to the level of the brute creation. 
In this trying juncture he hesitated not to hazard his honors and 
his life, by faithfully disclosing the counsels of Heaven and re- 
commending to the proud monarch humiliation and repentance : 
“ This is the interpretation, O king, and this is the decree of the 
Most High, that thou shalt be driven from the society of men, 
and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field, till seven 
times shall pass over thee, and thou know that the Most High 
ruleth in the kingdoms of men, and giveth them to whom he 
will. Wherefore, O king, let my counsel be acceptable to thee, 
and break off thy sins by righteousness, and thine iniquities by 
showing mercy to the poor, if it may be a lengthening of thy 
tranquil lity.” 

A still more awful judgment of Heaven it fell to Daniel’s lot 
to denounce against the grandson of Nebuchadnezzar, and last 
monarch of his line, when Babylon was now besieged by the 
victorious arms of the Persians and Medes ; nor, in declaring to 
the dissolute Belshazzar the import of the handwriting upon the 
palace wall, did he swerve from that uprightness and fidelity to 
his God which had hitherto guided his conduct on similar emer- 
gencies. “ Thou hast lifted up thyself,” said this intrepid servant, 
“ against the Lord of heaven, and the God in whose hand thy 
breath is hast thou not glorified. Then was the part of the 
hand sent from him ; and this is the interpretation of the 
thing : God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. Thou 
art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. Thy king- 
dom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.” 

u In that night was Belshazzar slain ; and Darius the Median,” 


DANIEL. 


411 


or, as he is otherwise called by profane writers, Cyaxares, “ took 
the kingdom.” This change of dynasty produced no alteration 
in Daniel's condition. The estimation in which he was held 
and the confidence reposed .in him by the new sovereign appears, 
indeed, to have been unlimited. “ It pleased Darius,” says the 
sacred historian, “ to set over the empire a hundred and twenty 
princes, and over these three presidents, of whom Daniel was the 
first, because an excellent spirit was in him ; and the king de- 
signed to set him over the whole realm.” This proposed exalta- 
tion of one who, though of royal extraction, and of acknowledged 
pre-eminence in respect of ability and worth, was still no more 
than a captive, aroused the jealousy of the other princes and 
nobles with whom he was associated in the government of the 
widely-extended provinces of this vast empire, and a general 
conspiracy was accordingly formed against him. 

The eminent talents and endowments of Daniel, coupled with 
his unimpeachable probity, both in his capacity of a judge and 
of administrator of the public revenue, rendered the success of 
any charges proposed to be brought against him for incapacity 
or malversation in office altogether hopeless ; “ forasmuch as he 
was faithful, neither was there any error or fault to be found in 
him.” Of this the band of conspirators were well aware. 
“ Therefore,” said they, “ we shall not find any occasion against 
this Daniel, except on the score of the law of his God.” Against 
this point, therefore, they resolved to direct their efforts to destroy 
him. Daniel's devotion to his God was well known. At each 
of the three hours of prayer prescribed by the institution of his 
country he was wont daily to offer up supplication, with his 
face directed toward the holy temple of Jerusalem, as suggested 
in the solemn prayer of Solomon at the dedication of that sacred 
edifice. 

Availing themselves of the ground offered by this pious prac- 
tice of Daniel, and well assured that he would on no account 
desist from it, whatever personal consequences might ensue, the 


412 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


conspirators applied to Darius to have it enacted that no man 
should, on pain of being cast into a den of lions, offer supplica- 
tion to any god or man, for the space of thirty days, save unto 
the king — a proposition which was not more shockingly impious 
than many other gross flatteries offered in heathen times to 
princes of countries more enlightened than Assyria, and which 
might appear, perhaps, to Darius to be aimed against the Baby- 
lonish idolatries, which the Medes and Persians, whose faith and 
worship was less impure, viewed with contempt and detestation. 
Having procured the enactment of this ungodly and insidious 
decree, the enemies of Daniel failed not to find the ground of 
accusation which they sought ; for to withhold, at the command 
of man, the honor which is due to God — to apostatize, even for a 
single day, from God’s service, and virtually to acknowledge de- 
pendence on a fellow-mortal as the supreme and only object of 
supplication and arbiter of human destiny — was to Daniel’s mind 
much more shocking than death, even in its most frightful forms. 
The charge being straightway preferred, and sentence, according 
to the letter of the decree, demanded, Darius’ eyes were imme- 
diately opened to the malignant purposes of his princes; but the 
rigid character of the laws of the Medes and Persians, which ap- 
pear, even at that period, to have been 'proverbially spoken of as 
unalterable, forbade the authoritative interposition of the monarch 
in behalf of the accused. Deeply grieved for the impending fate 
of one whose life was so valuable, and bitterly reproaching him- 
self for his easy accession to a plot so infamous, Darius sought to 
find means of evading the consequences of his rash decree, and 
“ labored,” we are told, “ till the going down of the sun, to de- 
liver” his faithful servant. But the views he entertained of his 
duty as the guardian of his country’s laws, and his apprehension 
of general evils which might ensue were enactments, formally 
oompleted, to be set aside, directly or indirectly, by the mere will 
of sovereigns, appear to have restrained him from adopting 
measures for effecting his just and merciful purpose, and with a 


DANIEL . 


413 


heavy heart he consigned the victim of treachery to the bar- 
barous punishment which his decree appointed. 

It was not, however, without a secret hope of his deliverance by 
a higher power that Darius saw his faithful servant cast into the 
lions’ den ; and after a sleepless night, he returned, full of anxiety, 
to the spot, and with a faltering voice called upon Daniel’s name : 
“ O Daniel, servant of the living God, is thy God whom thou 
servest able to deliver thee from the lions?” The answer veri- 
fied the hopes which the king had cherished : “ My God bath 
sent his angel, and hath shut the lions’ mouths, that they have 
not hurt me; forasmuch as before him innocency was found in 
me : and also before thee, O king, have I done no hurt.” 

Thus did the Almighty show that in his hands alone are the 
issues of life and of death, and by this stupendous interposition 
did he sanction and establish for ever the truth of that principle 
which governed the life of his servant — that “ God is, and is a 
rewarder of them that diligently seek him ; ” that in this life he 
can at his pleasure deliver them from dangers the most immi- 
nent, and if not in this life, in another, he certainly will redeem 
them from every evil and bestow all possible good. The im- 
pression made on the mind of the king by this signal act of 
divine interposition did not pass inactively away, but produced 
that memorable edict which was sent forth, addressed u to all 
people, nations and ^nguages that dwell in all the earth”: 
u I Darius issue my decree, that in every dominion of my king- 
dom men tremble and fear before the God of Daniel. For he is 
the living God, and steadfast for ever; and his kingdom that 
which shall not be destroyed, and his dominion shall be even 
unto the end.” 

During the remainder of Darius’ brief administration, Daniel 
continued to be his chief and favorite counselor, and remained in 
the same situation of honor and trust for several years after Cyrus 
had assumed the undivided sovereignty of the empire. There is 
IK doubt that he had a principal hand in procuring from that 


414 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


monarch permission to the Jews to return to their native land; 
and having seen that great object of all his labors and all his 
desires on this side heaven accomplished, he died in peace in 
extreme old age, having numbered ninety years and upward. 

There is, perhaps, in human character nothing so truly noble 
as that integrity whicli readily perils all present interests rather 
than comply with aught that opposes the will of the all-perfect 
Being to whom men owe life and all things. To gross depravity 
only, and that united with the most miserable blindness or im- 
becility of judgment, can such conduct become the subject of 
indifference or disrespect; while to right reason, no less than to 
true piety, it must ever be the object of unmingled admiration. 
To this distinguishing feature of the character before us was 
added another, which is uniformly found adjoined in all the 
greatest characters which have adorned our race — that of pro- 
found humility. In the fasting and humiliation of Daniel pre- 
vious to the supplication he addressed to God for the restoration 
of his people, and in the deep contrition which, in his sublime 
and affecting prayer on that occasion, he expresses, for his own 
sins as well as those of his nation, the least imperfect and sinful 
of the sons of men may learn what lowly thoughts it becomes 
them to entertain of themselves. 

The lot of Daniel doubtless contained much of the ordinary 
materials of human happiness, and it is not to be supposed that 
he was wholly insensible to its blessings. But the temporal 
honors and prosperity bestowed upon him were deeply mingled 
with those numberless anxieties, griefs and hazards which the 
exile who mourns his conquered country, and sighs for the home 
of his fathers, bears continually in his bosom, even amidst the 
insipid pageantry of greatness and the reverence reluctantly ten- 
dered him in a foreign land. It is not to be doubted, therefore, 
that, welcome as is the shadow of a great rock to the weary pil- 
grim of the desert, so to him whose hope was in heaven would 
be the message of Michael the archangel, when he summed up 


DANIEL. 


415 


the prophetic visions of Messiah’s days, which, at the close of 
Daniel’s long life, were vouchsafed him : “ The words are sealed 
unto the time of the end “ and go thou and rest until the end 
he. For thou shalt rest , and shalt stand in thy lot at the end 
of days.” 

In this life enjoyment is not the native condition of the soul, 
which only knows what joy is by experiencing the sensation at 
distant intervals, while the portions of life which intervene are 
comparatively insipid or embittered by troubles. But in heaven 
the soul shall “rest.” There, not the occasional presence of 
transitory objects producing joy, but joy itself, is promised. The 
soul needs not then the presence of such objects. When once it 
shall have awakened from the dream of life, in the immediate 
presence of God, its unchangeable, its natural state, is joy. 
Among the varied sensations to be experienced in our present 
state, few, perhaps, are so delightful, or crowd into a single mo- 
ment such exquisite feelings of joyful relief, as that which every 
one may have experienced when, just awakened from a troubled 
dream, he finds that the irremediable misery into which he 
imagined himself plunged, or the inexplicable guilt he had con- 
tracted, has vanished in a moment. So shall it be with all the 
apprehensions and sorrows which now he deems realities, when 
the faithful servant of God awakens, with similar sensations of 
delight, after passing the dark valley and shadow of death ; they 
shall have vanished like the oppressive visions of the night. 
We may strive in vain, while this body is our home, to act and 
feel in conformity with tne conviction of our reason, that the 
shapeless forms of affliction which assail us, and the fearful 
spectres of danger which stalk around us, are, and by him who 
is bound for eternity ought to be, accounted as less than nothing 
and vanity. But let us only, in imitation of the character before 
us, hold fast our integrity and our hope in God “ until the end be,” 
and we too shall “stand in our lot at the end of days,” joyful in a 
sudden and entire redemption from all labors, fears and sorrows. 



XXXIV. 

ZE OH AEI AH. 

HE mission of Zechariah was more especially to en- 
courage his countrymen on their return from captivity, 
to restore Jerusalem and rebuild the temple. We select 
him, as one of our succession of Scripture characters, in 
order to possess an unbroken history of the Jewish people, and 
of their political, civil and religious condition at various periods. 
From the time of the captivity to the close of the Jewish nation- 
ality, a new phase in the prophetical writings becomes manifest — 
the prophets cease to denounce the idolatry of the Jews. Indeed, 
the captivity appears to have cured them of this enormous crime, 
as from that period, however prone they were to backsliding, 
still they set up no idolatrous worship in preference to the ser- 
vice of Jehovah. Other nations are still condemned and de- 
nounced, and so are the people of Israel, for their indifference ; 
but now we have heart-searching appeals, blessed promises, a 
careful enunciation of religious privileges, constant reference to 
the coming of Messiah, and painful indications of the dispersion 
of the Israelites because of their rejection of the Saviour. The 
only exceptions that we can make among the Jews, from the 
above observations, were a few who fell into idolatry during the 
reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, spoken of in the Book of the 
Maccabees. 

Zechariah was one of those who returned to Jerusalem at the 
close of the captivity. When he commenced his prophetical 

416 



ZECHARIAH. 


417 


labors, he appears to have been a young man. In the year B. C. 
520 we find him, with the prophet Haggai, assisting Zerubbabel 
and Joshua the high priest in animating the inhabitants of Jeru- 
salem in the great work of rebuilding the temple. To this all 
his writings are directed. His book divides itself into two parts 
— the first containing the first eight chapters; and the second, 
the remaining six, which from their style and subjects seem to 
have been written near the end of his life, when his mind was 
more mature, and when the state of things in Jerusalem was 
greatly altered. How long Zechariah lived, or when he died, is 
not known. He is generally supposed to have ended his days at 
Jerusalem ; and in the valley of Jehoshaphat there is still pointed 
out to travelers a tomb which is called “ the tomb of Zechariah 
the prophet.” So similar in style is he to Jeremiah that the Jews 
considered that the spirit of that prophet had passed into Zecha- 
riah ; and so highly were his predictions esteemed that he was 
called “ the sun among the lesser prophets.” There is much 
vigor in the predictions of this prophet. His visions demand a 
careful perusal. 

In the work of restoring the house of God the Samaritans in- 
terposed, desiring that they might be permitted to share in the 
undertaking. Being a mixed race, the descendants of the Is- 
raelites who remained in the northern kingdom after the cap- 
tivity of the ten tribes, intermarrying with the Gentile colonists 
from Assyria, Zerubbabel and the other Jewish rulers negatived 
their request. This led to a long controversy, to inveterate hos- 
tility and to much bloodshed. The feelings of men are more 
intensely awakened by their religion than by anything else, and 
hence the heat of religious dissension. Never was this more 
fully shown than at this period in the history of the Jews. For 
a long time the Samaritans prevented the Jews from restoring the 
temple ; and even when the latter were allowed to build, they were 
compelled to do so with the sword in one hand and the trowel ir» 
the other. Hence the hatred which existed for centuries between 


27 


418 


GREAT MEN OF tr OD. 


the Jews and the Samaritans, kept alive by the latter raising a 
temple for themselves on Mount Gerizim. It was Darius, the 
son of Hystaspes, twenty years after the edict of Cyrus, who by 
decree allowed the Jews to erect their second temple. During 
the second year of the reign of this king, Zechariah delivered the 
first series of his predictions. 

He reminds his countrymen of the sins of their fathers and of 
the sore displeasure of the Lord against them. He appeals to 
them to return from every wicked way, to serve the living God, 
and promises that he w T ould return to them and abundantly 
bless them. He brings to their recollection the certainty of 
God’s word as spoken by his prophets and his faithfulness in its 
fulfillment, and by a series of striking illustrations endeavors to 
arouse the Jews to diligence in the work of restoring both the 
city of Jerusalem and the house of God, and heartily to engage 
in his worship and service. The first vision is that of “a man 
riding upon a red horse, and behind him there were red horses, 
speckled, and white.” “The red horse,” in prophetical lan- 
guage, is the emblem of war ; the man upon it is said to be “ the 
angel of the Lord,” by Jewish writers referred to the angel 
Michael, and by Lowth, Gill and others applied — and we think 
properly — to the Angel of the Covenant, the Son of Man, the 
Messiah. He is here represented as a man of war; and truly 
against the principalities and powers of darkness — against all 
wickedness — he wages a deadly conflict. Nor is he alone : 
others are with him, with horses of different colors — horses which 
indicate strength and swiftness to obey his will, however varied 
may be their work ; whilst their being under the shade of the 
myrtle trees in the valley shows that they have been busily en- 
gaged in executing the divine purpose — are resting, but resting 
so as instantly to be ready to do the bidding of the Lord. 

Age has its own advantages. It gives maturity to the judg- 
ment, ripeness to the experience, vividness and strength to faith, 
consolidation to the character, and nearness and power to eter- 


ZECHARIAH. 


419 


nity and eternal realities. It clothes with a peculiar relish Chris- 
tian hope, and encircles everything connected with Christ and 
his kingdom with the radiant atmosphere of a holy satisfaction. 
The very compositions of age differ from those of youth. There 
is a solidity about them which seems to say, “Life is retreating; 
we have much to do, and a limited season in which to accomplish 
it.” They may lack many of the graces of earlier productions, 
and much of their fire, but they possess far more of the ringing 
metal of right thought and compact logic. Every word has 
weight, every sentence wisdom. Men learn, as they advance in 
years, that life is not sustained by flowers, but nourished by fruit, 
and that barley-meal is better than blossoms. Age tames the 
imagination and tones down the fancy, but gives insight to 
character, a knowledge of the world, and leads to perfect con- 
fidence alone in God. 

It has been thought — and, we imagine, correctly — that the 
later prophecies of Zechariah are the productions of age. There 
is an elevation about them, a reference to the future, and a desire 
for the highest order of prosperity for his country, which betoken 
the spiritualizing influence of an approaching eternity. Circum- 
stances, too, had altered in Jerusalem in the course of years. The 
temple had been finished, but the priesthood had become de- 
praved. Events, also, of great interest were occurring in the 
history of other countries — their sins were being visited with 
punishment; and the prophet could not be silent about the state 
of his own people, and dared not be otherwise than faithful in 
warning and instructing them. To prepare his way, he begins 
by declaring “the burden of the Lord” on the land of Hadraeh 
and Damascus, portions of Syria ; on Hamath, Tyre and Sidon — • 
especially against Tyre, with all her wealth and strength. And 
so terrible is this judgment to be that “ Ashkelon is to see it, and 
fear ; Gaza, and to be very sorrowful ; and also Ekron ;” and 
these cities of the Philistines are to be ruled by foreigners and 
peopled by strangers; but amidst all these convulsions Jerusalem 


420 


GREAT MEN Ob GOD. 


is to dwell safely and her temple to flourish. Nay ; on the heels 
of this good news still better treads. A king is promised to Zion, 
“ lowly and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an 
ass,” who is to destroy the battle-bow in Israel, to speak peace to 
the heathen, and whose dominion is to reach from sea to sea, and 
from the river to the ends of the earth. Well may the prophet, 
in the name of the Lord, address the oppressed and say, “Turn 
ye to the stronghold, ye prisoners of hope ; even to-day will I 
render double unto you.” And congratulating Messiah, well 
may he add, “As for thee also, by the blood of thy covenant 
I have sent forth thy prisoners out of the pit wherein is no 
water.” 

Zechariah, early after the captivity, feared for the people, be- 
cause he discovered the ungodliness of the priests. He exhorts, 
therefore, in the tenth chapter, that they look to the Lord for 
their mercies, consult him alone, and disregard all other gods 
besides him. On the supposition of their doing so, victory is 
promised to the Jews over their enemies and, which was actually 
accorded to them in the days of the Maccabees, over the princes 
of the Grecian monarchy. But this, we think, was only a typical 
triumph, and the completion of this prophecy yet remains to be 
realized in the restoration of the Jews. Whether they are to re- 
turn to their own land in these last days, or are only to be restored 
by being brought to a saving knowledge of the true Messiah, is a 
question which has been much disputed. 

The eleventh chapter is a most solemn prophecy. It is full of 
threatening — foretells the ruin of the temple and city of Jeru- 
salem by the Romans, and the dispersion of the Jews, by the re- 
jection of Jesus Christ the Saviour. Even their distinguished 
men are to perish : “ Howl, fir tree, for the cedar has fallen.” 
The city is to become a heap and the temple a ruin ; the towns 
and cities are to become desolate, and the fields to remain uncul- 
tivated. The people are to be scattered over the surface of the 
earth, for the greatness of their sin; even their Saviour is to be sold 


ZECIIAR1AH. 


421 


to his murderers for thirty pieces of silver. How literally this 
prediction, with all connected with the dispersion of the Jews, 
has been fulfilled! Surely, God’s ancient people are a living 
monument of the truth of his word. All he has said regarding 
them, as far as their history has been unfolded, he has fulfilled. 
This will be even more abundantly demonstrated in their in- 
gathering than it has been in their rejection. The world will 
again be taught that there is a God in Israel. 

The three remaining chapters of the book of Zechariah contain 
a series of predictions, and constitute one discourse. These pro- 
phecies are generally referred for their fulfillment to gospel times. 
The former part of the twelfth chapter announces the preserva- 
tion of Jerusalem against a frightful invasion in the latest ages 
of the world, and appears to be identical with the conflict of Gog, 
of the land of Magog, against Israel, described in the thirty- 
eighth and the thirty-ninth chapters of the prophecies of Ezekiel. 
Spiritually, it contains a prophecy of the defence, protection and 
security of the Church of God from all its enemies. The latter 
part consists of an account of the repentance and sore grief of 
the Jews because their fathers had crucified the Saviour. The 
thirteenth chapter “ opens a fountain in the house of David, and 
to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, for sin and uncleanness ;” and 
this, by setting at naught the malpredictions of the false prophets, 
by the coming of Christ, by the smiting of the Shepherd, by the 
gathering of a remnant, and the open acknowledgment by the 
Lord of his people by saying, “It is my people,” and they by 
professing that “the Lord is their God.” Again, in the four- 
teenth chapter, as in the twelfth, the overthrow of the enemies 
of Israel — the enemies of the Church of God — is predicted ; the 
final conversion of the nations is announced ; Jehovah is pro- 
claimed king over the whole earth; “holiness to the Lord” 
becomes the banner-inscription of all lands; and the sacred 
vessels, yea, and the pots of Jerusalem and Judah, are to be- 
come holiness to the Lord ; everything is to be sanctified by 


422 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


religion, and men are to find an occasion of being religious in 
everything — 

“ Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, 

Sermons in stones, and good in everything.” 

What a heaven on earth will be enjoyed then ! So far now as 
Christianity has done its work, mind has been strengthened, 
society has been elevated, man has been made happy, nations 
have been blessed, and God has been glorified. Let the whole 
world be so influenced, men become righteous, and most assuredly 
we shall have a “ new heavens and a new earth.” The prophet 
of the restoration anticipates for our world this hallowed con- 
summation. 




XXXY. 

EZRA. 

X the seventh year of Artaxerxes Longimanus, Ezra 
set out for Jerusalem with a company in all of six or 
seven thousand souls. Eighty years had now elapsed 
since Zerubbabel and his company had returned to the 
holy city, so that he and most of those who accompanied him 
must now have been dead. Ezra was a descendant of the high 
priest Seraiah, whom Nebuchadnezzar had put to death at the 
capture of Jerusalem. His chief object in returning was to re- 
establish fully and firmly the laws of Moses — a task for which 
his talents and training, as a ready scribe in the law, abundantly 
qualified him. He set out from Babylon, assembling his com- 
pany at the river Ahava, a stream in Chaldea not now known. 
Four months were occupied in crossing the desert. Besides carry- 
ing with them a multitude of gold and silver vessels, Ezra and 
his friends had an order from the king authorizing the local 
treasurers of the imperial revenue to pay him what was necessary 
for his sacred mission. 

On arriving at Jerusalem, he found, to his great distress, that 
his people had paid no regard to the law which prohibited their 
marriage with idolaters, and that the very princes had been fore- 
most in forming those unhallowed connections. In the deepest 
humiliation of spirit, Ezra deplored their offence to the Lord, 
and, to his great relief, found soon after that the spirit of con- 
trition had taken hold of the offenders. Measures were then 

423 



424 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


devised for separating them from their idolatrous wives and re- 
storing the purity of the law of Moses. 

Besides this important piece of reform, Ezra took a prominent 
part in another service, of the most valuable kind, with which 
his name will ever be honorably associated. This was the 
arranging, editing and publishing the Book of the Law, or canon 
of Scripture. It appears from various notices that up to this 
time copies of the law were very scarce among the Jews. Now 
that the people had returned from Babylon, they would not only 
be scarce, but to many the language in which the law was written 
would hardly be intelligible. Ezra’s first care was to read the 
law publicly in the presence of the people, and as he read he 
explained the meaning in the ordinary dialect of the day. It 
has always been believed that Ezra was the person who, by 
divine inspiration, edited the books of the law, supplementing 
pieces of information that the original writers could not have 
supplied, perhaps compiling the Books of Chronicles, and ar- 
ranging the order of the books in general, and of the Psalms in 
particular. Formerly the old Hebrew character had been used 
in writing ; in place of this, Ezra substituted the better formed 
and finished letters of the Chaldee alphabet. The old character 
was preserved among the Samaritans, and is still to be seen in a 
very old copy of the Pentateuch, treasured by a small remnant 
of that people now residing at Nablous or Shechem. 

Some of the changes thus introduced by Ezra were of the 
utmost practical importance. The full acquaintance with the 
word of God which the Jewish people were now enabled to ac- 
quire must have tended greatly to discourage idolatry, and pro- 
mote that devotedness to the letter at least of the law for which 
they now became so eminent. Out of the arrangements which 
Ezra began, two things arose that had ultimately a very great 
influence, partly for good and partly for evil. One of these was 
the institution of synagogues and synagogue-worship ; the other, 
the system of traditions. It does not appear that before the cap- 


EZRA. 


425 


rivity the Jews had synagogues ; but after the captivity they were 
set up in every direction, for the reading of the law, exhortation 
and prayer. The reading and expounding of the law now be- 
came a regular profession, and it was not confined to the priests, 
or even to the tribe of Levi. By the “ lawyers” (as the members 
of that profession were called) the written word was expounded 
and supplemented wherever it appeared obscure or defective. 
Gradually the notion gained ground that besides the written law 
there was an oral law, which God had communicated to the 
fathers, but not recorded, the knowledge of which could be ob- 
tained and preserved only by tradition. This constituted the 
“ tradition of the elders,” in connection with which our Lord 
often showed so great and so just indignation, in the middle of 
the second century after Christ, Babbi Judah, the -on of Simeon, 
a celebrated doctor, collected these traditions, and committed 
them to writing. The book in which they were collected was 
called the Mishna. Commentaries on the Mishna have been 
written by learned rabbis, the commentary alone being called 
the Gemara, and the commentary and Mishna together the 
Talmud. The Babylonish Talmud, or the Talmud compiled by 
the Chaldean Jews, is a work in twelve folio volumes. Out of 
this vast mass of tradition the real spirit of the law and the 
prophets has been almost entirely eliminated. 




XXXVI. 

IEHEMIAH. 

O understand the character and appreciate the history 
of this great Jewish patriot and religious reformer, it 
is necessary that we turn our eyes to Jerusalem and 
acquaint ourselves with the state of the Jewish people 
and nation at the moment when he comes upon the scene. 

The second temple has been reared by the hands of Zerubbabel 
in the midst of frowning difficulties and in the face of many foes, 
and its long-interrupted solemn rites restored. Large portions 
of the city have also been rebuilt, the eloquence of the prophets 
Ilaggai and Zechariah, as well as the pious zeal of Ezra, second- 
ing the efforts of the governors and helping to quicken the 
energies of the dispirited community. 

But the prosperity of the city is checked, the seemly order of 
its temple-worship disturbed, and the people kept in constant 
anxiety and alarm by the fact that its walls are still in ruins 
and its gates burnt with fire. They are thus exposed to the 
assaults of the jealous and hostile tribes by whom they are sur- 
rounded, their energies exhausted and their very existence 
threatened. 

And yet the preservation of this beleaguered and feeble people 
is an event of highest importance to the whole human race. In 
them the Church of God is to be continued on the earth, and the 
permanent religious education of the world secured. For ages 
to come they are to be the consecrated guardians of the know- 

426 




NEHEMIAH. 


427 


ledge and worship of the true God, who are to hold high the 
lamp of heavenly truth, and preserve it from extinction until He 
who is “ the desire of all nations ” shall come and send its blessed 
light all over the earth. They are to be “an illuminated clock 
placed by the hand of God himself in the dark steeple of time.” 

In these circumstances, where shall we look for the man who 
is to rebuild the walls of the sacred city, and thus to protect its 
worship, to inspire with hope and bind in unity its disjointed 
multitudes, and to introduce those elements of strength which 
shall ultimately turn the feeble colony into an independent 
nation ? 

To find the answer to this question, we must pass in thought 
to the dominions of Artaxerxes Longimanus, king of Persia, who 
continues to hold the Jews who have migrated to their own land 
in subjection as a tributary colony. From various causes many 
of the chosen people still linger in the land of their exile, and 
among these there is one who stands high in the confidence and 
at the court of this great monarch of the East, and whom God 
has evidently “ raised up for such a time as this,” and this is 
Nehemiah, the king’s cupbearer. 

Who could have expected to find, in this place above all others, 
the man who, in a double sense, was to “ build up the waste places 
of Zion”? But the history of the Church abounds in instances 
in which all its future appears for a time to hang on the brittle 
thread of a single human life, and in which God has his hidden 
instruments waiting for acting effectively, and for stepping forth 
at the fittest juncture and “ turning the shadow of death into the 
morning.” 

THE CUPBEARER. 

I. And here we must be on our guard against allowing our- 
selves to be misled by the mere sound of the designation that is 
given to Nehemiah. In the literal form of his office as cup- 
bearer his duty was to wait on the king’s person, and to pour 
out the wine before him and present it to him in a graceful 


428 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


manner, having previously dipped a smaller cup into the larger 
one that was presented to his royal master, and tasted the wine 
as an assurance that it was not poisoned. But it is not difficult 
to understand how this office, bringing the individual who bore 
it into frequent and confiding intercourse with the king, should 
gradually have become one of highest emolument, influence and 
trust. The king’s cupbearer, in fact, grew into the king’s coun- 
selor; it became his duty to decide who should be admitted into 
the king’s presence and who should be rejected, and to introduce 
and commend those whom he approved. 

To this position of highest honor and confidence his high 
abilities and tried fidelity had gradually raised this descendant 
of Hebrew exiles in the court of the greatest potentate of the 
East. We must conceive of him as now discharging his office at 
Shushan, the winter palace of the Persian king, of whose mag- 
nificence and splendor ancient historians have written with an 
enthusiasm which it is difficult to believe has not betrayed them 
into exaggeration and fable. But even the sober and truthful 
pages of the Book of Esther bring up before our imagination a 
gorgeous and dazzling picture of the palace of Shushan, with its 
curtains of fine linen and purple suspended on rings of silver 
and pillars of marble ; its couches of ivory, silver and gold stand- 
ing on pavements of the most costly stones ; its sparkling foun- 
tains cooling the air; its flowers spreading fragrance ;. its trees 
dropping fruit and offering grateful shade, — everything, in fact, 
to regale the senses and to soothe the spirit. In the midst of all 
this splendor and luxury, and surrounded by a crowd of attend- 
ants and ministers of state, moved Nehemiah, “ as to the manner 
born,” the counselor and confidant of their king. 

PIETY OF NEHEMIAH. 

II. I confess that, next to my devout wondering at the provi- 
dence of God which had raised Nehemiah to this elevation for 
future service to his Church, that which most of all impresses my 


NEHEMIAH. 


429 


mind is the fact that he had maintained his attachment to his 
people and his religion in the midst of all these unfavorable in- 
fluences. Knowing the power of outward circumstances to mould 
the character, especially when these circumstances fall in with our 
natural tastes, we should have feared that this Hebrew, after re- 
sisting the strong current of custom and general feeling for a 
time, would by degrees have yielded to its power, and that, with 
every luxury at his command, he would at length have owned 
the spell of the enchantment and became conformed in character 
to those around him. 

Moreover, as men in circumstances of comfort and ease are 
naturally unwilling to be disturbed by thoughts of suffering and 
complaints of sorrow, we can imagine him to have shut out from 
his mind all grating recollections of distant Jerusalem and her 
depressed and struggling colonists. Everything in that luxurious 
court and palace seemed formed to exclude all thoughts of suffer- 
ing and sadness; why should he, by busy remembrances and 
vagrant fancies, dissolve the pleasing spell and lead the gloomy 
spectre in ? Let him forget what he is unable to prevent, assimi- 
late to the charmed circle in which he moves, and drink with 
zest the cup of pleasure which every day is held up so invitingly, 
to his lips. 

But it is not thus that Kehemiah thinks and feels. In the 
midst of all these influences, before which everything but a living 
piety would have perished, his eye remains single, his heart pure 
and his faith unshaken. He sees through all the enchantment 
that is around him, knows what it is all really worth, and does 
his duty in the midst of it all without being dazzled by it. 
Moving amid those marble pillars and incense-laden groves, 
among courtiers and scheming- flatterers, the heart of this true 
Hebrew is often far away at Jerusalem and its temple, and with 
the oppressed remnant that have begun to build and inhabit the 
homes of their fathers; and in his prayers he secretly pledges 
again and again his imperishable love to the chosen people and 


430 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


the holy city : “ If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand 
forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue 
cleave to the roof of my mouth ; if I prefer not Jerusalem above 
my chief joy.” 

There was no doubt much of true patriotism in all this, but 
there was more still of true piety. The love of a devout Jew for 
Jerusalem was not the mere common love of fatherland, but of 
all that Jerusalem represented and enshrined — love for the true 
religion and for pure worship, for the Church and people of 
God. 

It is, then, a possible thing to keep alive our piety when duty 
has placed us in the midst of influences that are unfavorable to 
its growth, and even unfriendly to its existence; for this Jew 
could keep the sacred flame burning amid the ungenial atmo- 
sphere of a heathen court. 

That we have not overstated the devout love of Nehemiah for 
Jerusalem is evident from the eager inquiries with which he 
questioned his brother Hanani and other men of Judah who at 
length arrived, weary and travel-stained, at Shushan, from the 
distant holy city. It is likely that even their countenances re- 
vealed in part the sorrowful nature of the message which they 
brought; but when they entered into the detailed description of 
Jerusalem’s misery and reproach, and proceeded to tell him of 
the defenceless city, with its still ruined walls and burnt-up gates, 
and the consequent affliction of its people, daily embittered by 
the taunts of their idolatrous assailants — “ Where is now your 
God?” — the soul of the magnanimous Hebrew was now for a 
time completely overwhelmed by the evil tidings which so far 
exceeded even his worst fears. In the greatness of his sorrow, 
his natural food became distasteful and unwelcome to him; “he 
wept and mourned certain days, and fasted.” But when these 
first strong outbursts of his grief were past, he turned for relief 
to that quarter to which every pious heart will be sure to turn 
in its affliction — to the power, compassion and faithfulness of 


NEIIEMIAH. 


431 


his covenant God. “ I prayed,” says he, “ before the God of 
heaven.” 

PRAYER FOR DIRECTION. 

III. It is especially worthy of notice that, in his u fervent, 
inwrought prayer,” Nehemiah brings before his mind those 
aspects of the divine character and relations which are particu- 
larly fitted to sustain and encourage him in his supplications. 
He does not present mere random ascriptions, but the first 
adoring sentence covers, as it were, and vindicates, every subse- 
quent plea. What an appropriateness there is, for example, in 
the first name by which he addresses Jehovah as “ the God of 
heaven ” ! Those Persian idolaters presented much of their wor- 
ship to the heavenly bodies — the sun, moon and stars, or to 
emblems that represented these ; but looking up into the starry 
firmament from some recess in the gardens of Shushan whither 
he had retired to pray, he could claim and worship that God who 
had framed all these bright luminaries, and who kept them in 
order, as his God. 

Let it not be supposed that the next designation of Jehovah as 
“ the great and terrible God ” is the least in opposition to those 
sentiments of filial trust which we have ascribed to Nehemiah. 
If there is a glance in this language at the judgments which God 
had executed on the Jewish nation because of their apostasy and 
idolatry, I conceive that it is yet more intended to express the 
thought that, notwithstanding the present weakness and de- 
pression of the Jewish nation, God was able both to restrain and 
to punish the wickedness and cruelty of those who continued to 
oppress them, and to cause their very “ wrath to praise him.” 
Accordingly, he immediately proceeds to speak of him further as 
“ the God that keepeth covenant and mercy for them that love 
him and keep his commandments.” The whole affords an in- 
structive and beautiful illustration of the manner in which a 
believer under the Christian dispensation, having “ acquainted 
himself with God,” and found peace in the discoveries and 


432 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


promises of the gospel, may expatiate in thought upon the 
boundless universe, and gather from all the manifestations of 
divine power and wisdom which he can read there ground for 
confidence and matter for prayer. 

Confession of sin fitly follows adoration, and Nehemiah reads 
the divine condemnation of the obdurate rebellion and apostasy 
of his people in those burnt gates and ruined walls : “ I confess 
the sins of the children of Israel which we have sinned against 
thee.” But the personal character of this confession is perhaps 
its most interesting part, because it is the strongest proof that it is 
real. There is a way of acknowledging sin so vague and general 
as rather to deaden than to quicken the sense of it. The individual 
loses himself in the multitude. The secret thought of his heart 
is, “ What are my personal sins to those of my nation but as a 
drop in the ocean?” and thus what outwardly takes the shape 
of an acknowledgment is spoken to his heart as an apology. 

But it is not thus that the truly broken and contrite spirit 
thinks and feels. As in the instance of Nehemiah, the indi- 
vidual^ own transgressions and those of his kindred confront 
him the most largely and darkly of all : “ Both I and my father’s 
house have sinned.” For just as in external nature there is the 
law of perspective, which makes the objects that are nearest ap- 
pear the largest, so, it has been remarked, there is in the spiritual 
world a moral perspective, which causes every man who feels 
aright to know the wickedness of his own heart the best and to 
mourn over it the most. 

And now taking fast hold of the divine faithfulness and cove- 
nant, this ardent worshiper lays down at the footstool of heavenly 
mercy his great petition that God would maintain the cause of 
his now penitent people, consolidate their national strength and 
restore their waste places. I admire the holy ingenuity with 
which the petition is urged. God had been faithful to his 
threatenings when his people had revolted against him, and had 
scattered them abroad among the nations, and Nehemiah finds a 


NEHEMIAH. 


433 


foothold for his faith even among their ruins and desolations, 
making him bold to plead that he would now show himself 
equally faithful to his promises. His people had now turned to 
him and kept his commandments; and had he not said that if 
they did so, “ even though they were cast out into the uttermost 
part of the heaven, he would gather them from thence” and cause 
the light of his countenance anew to shine upon them?* This 
promise had been spoken and recorded more than a thousand 
years before, but it had not become effete or obsolete. The ink 
in which the holy and immutable God writes his engagements 
never becomes dim or fades. 

The manner in which Nehemiah now takes his solid footing 
upon this word of God reminds us of Augustine’s description of 
the prayers of his mother Monica for his conversion while he was 
still her profligate son. She particularly pleaded the promises 
of God in reference to the seed of believers, laid her finger as it 
were upon his very Words — “showed him his own handwriting;” 
and all the Church knows how her noble importunity and mighty 
faith prevailed. It was in the same spirit that Nehemiah now 
knelt before the divine mercy-seat, while, with his mouth filled 
with holy arguments, he urged the further thought of the dis- 
honor that would be cast by the heathen upon the divine name 
were his servants and people, when they had now returned to 
him, to have “ their house left unto them desolate.” 

This prayer had often been presented in substance by Nehe- 
miah ; he had “ prayed it before the Lord day and night.” And 
it would seem that while thus offering it up from time to time, 
the thought had gradually formed itself into a solemn and de- 
liberate purpose that if he should obtain the consent of his royal 
master, and promise of the necessary equipments and resources, 
he himself would undertake the arduous but welcome enterprise 
of rebuilding the ruined walls and reviving and consolidating 
the national strength. This accounts for the request with which 
die prayer is closed — that “ God would grant him mercy in the 


434 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


sight of this man ;” in other words, that he would incline the 
heart of Artaxerxes to favor his suit when at some seasonable 
moment he preferred his petition for authority and assistance. 

But how much meaning there is in this language of Nehemiah ! 
It shows us how the sense of the divine presence and majesty, 
when it comes powerfully upon our spirit, tends to reduce the 
greatest of human beings to their proper level in our estimate — 
“ this man.” It is worthy of remark, however, that Nehemiah 
found it far more easy to make his request to the heavenly than 
to the earthly king — to the God of heaven than to Artaxerxes. 
Four months elapsed from the time of his first hearing of the 
great affliction and reproach of Jerusalem; winter had passed 
into the beautiful Persian spring before the favorable occasion 
offered itself of making his request that he might go to its relief; 
and when the opportunity did at length present itself, it came 
unexpectedly. 

SUCCESS. 

IV. I think it likely that, in his attendance on his royal mas- 
ter during the intervening months, there had been a constant 
effort to conceal the sorrow about Jerusalem that was so strongly 
at work in his breast, and that while he had many a time retired 
to weep and pray, he had done his utmost to maintain his wonted 
looks of cheerfulness when he stood before the king. 

The regulations of those Eastern courts forbade all sounds of 
grief or looks of sorrow within them. All was to be gay in 
those halls of splendor and haunts of luxury; the miseries that 
were without were to cast no dark shadow there. It was a vain 
battling against the stern logic of facts, a futile attempt of human 
power thus to practice a sort of deception upon itself. There was 
one dark spectre — death — who would enter when he chose, un- 
called and unwelcomed, and whom no porter or armed guards 
could keep out ; and that train of diseases which were commonly 
death’s harbingers and messengers would wait no human biddiug 
and respect no royal interdict. 


NEHEMIAH. 


435 


At length, however, the sorrow of this noble-minded Hebrew 
will not conceal. His many vigils of weeping and prayer, his 
“hope deferred which maketh the heart sick,” tell upon his 
countenance, and reveal to the keen eye of the monarch accus- 
tomed to read countenances and to penetrate disguises the exist- 
ence of a sorrow that is yet unspoken. Eager to know the secret 
mental cause that has thrown this deep shadow over his servant, 
he suddenly inquires, “ Why is thy countenance sad, seeing thou 
art not sick ? this is nothing else than sorrow of heart.” 

The question fills him with a new anxiety. Might not Arfc- 
axerxes be angry when he became aware that, while living in 
the sunshine of his favor, his thoughts had been far away with 
an afflicted people, and amid the desolations of the city and of 
his fathers? and might he not, with the proverbial caprice of 
men armed with absolute and arbitrary power, send back into 
deepest disgrace the man whom he had so often taken as his 
counselor? How much depended on his striking the right chord 
in the monarch’s mind, and on his doing this neither too vio- 
lently nor too gently ! The fate of his beloved Jerusalem and 
of everything precious in its future seems now to tremble in the 
balance. We do not wonder, therefore, when he tells us, “ Then 
I was sore afraid.” 

But thus far the pious patriot speeds in his interview. His 
reference to “ the city, the place of his fathers’ sepulchres lying 
waste, and the gates thereof consumed with fire,” awakens chords 
of human sympathy in the monarch’s bosom, without arousing 
his idolatrous prejudices, and draws forth from him the question 
which brings this momentous interview to a crisis: “For what 
dost thou make thy request?” But before he answers Artaxerxes 
there is another King to whom he makes his request. “So I 
prayed,” says he, “ to the God of heaven.” 

This is one of the most striking instances recorded in the Bible 
of what is commonly termed ejaculatory prayer — an example of 
the way in which good men, in the intercourse and business of 


436 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


daily life, especially when brought into circumstances of unex- 
pected difficulty, even when there is no motion of the lips, 
scarcely more, indeed, than an “ upward glancing of the eye,” 
may yet send up such a quick and compacted supplication to 
God as shall bring down all heaven to their aid. It is not 
meant that such ejaculations are to be a substitute for those more 
lengthened seasons of supplication of which we have just seen so 
interesting an example on the part of Nehemiah, but that they 
may be profitably used by us when the other is for the time 
impossible. 

“ When we are time-bound,” says good Thomas Fuller in his 
Good Thoughts , “ place-bound or person-bound, so that we cannot 
compose ourselves to make a large solemn prayer, this is the right 
instant for ejaculations, whether orally uttered or only poured 
forth inwardly in the heart. Ejaculations take not up any room 
in the soul. They give liberty of callings, so that at the same 
time one may follow his proper vocation.” Oh what a blessed 
resource to the Christian merchant amid the fretting annoyances 
and the thousand perplexities of business ! And what a benefit 
to all thus to fill up the intervals between their more prolonged 
devotions by brief ejaculatory prayers which go to make the 
whole life devout ! 

“These form the links of an electric chain 
That join the orisons of morn and eve, 

And propagate through all its several parts, 

While kept continuous, the ethereal fire.” 

What a moral distance at this moment separated between these 
two men — the King and his cupbearer ! Nehemiah, in that 
brief prayer, has passed into another world, of which his royal 
master knows nothing, and has enlisted on his side a power 
which can “ turn the heart of kings as a man turneth the courses 
of waters.” No doubt the purport of his petition was that he 
might be guided in the use of right words, and that God would 
prosper his request. Then, delivered by confidence in God from 


NEHEMIAH. 


437 


all unworthy fear of man, he calmly spreads before the king his 
petition that he might be released for a season from his office in 
his court, and commissioned to build up the waste places of Jeru- 
salem and to make it once more a strong and defenced city. A 
great future was involved in that request. “And the king 
granted me/’ says Nehemiah, “according to the good hand of my 
God upon me.” 

It is particularly important, however, that we should notice 
here that, while Nehemiah was thus a man of prayer and of de- 
vout dependence upon God, he neglected no arrangement for 
prospering his enterprise which forethought or prudence could 
suggest. Thus he obtained a military escort to surround his 
mission at once with dignity and safety. He asked for royal 
letters to the governors of the various provinces beyond the river 
Euphrates, through which he must pass on his way to Judah, by 
which his undertaking might be accredited, suspicion dispelled, 
and an addition to his convoy obtained when danger or other 
circumstances might render it expedient. In order that there 
might be no questioning of his authority or impeding of his 
work after he had reached Jerusalem, he asks for a special letter 
to Asaph, the keeper of the royal forest on the mountains of 
Lebanon, requiring him to send him as much timber as might 
be necessary for the various departments of his enterprise, while 
he also states in detail before the king what those various depart- 
ments are. 

How much there was in all this at once of wise forethought 
which would not throw over upon Providence difficulties which 
might be prevented by prudence, and of that clear and honorable 
explanation which is one great security against future misunder- 
standing and complaint ! The man of prayer is also a man of 
business. Nehemiah wishes to take nothing vaguely for granted ; 
he will know from the first the full extent of his authority and 
the measure of his resources; and having learned these, he will 
honorably keep within the pale of his commission. How much 


438 


GREA^T MEN OF GOD. 


of subsequent dispute and mutual recrimination have often lurked 
within the folds of an ill-made and vaguely-expressed bargain ! 

The whole narrative constrains us to remark on the power of 
prayer in influencing the history of the Church and the world. 
It is impossible not to feel, after the study of such a passage as 
this, that if human history were to be truly written — written as 
we may conceive an angel to write it — much less influence would 
be ascribed to the policy of kings and the diplomacy of states- 
men, and more to the prayers of holy men. Common history 
deals mainly with material forces ; inspired history lifts the veil 
and shows us those more subtle and spiritual forces in operation 
which do so much to shape the destiny alike of individuals and 
of communities. As this one Hebrew, for example, retired to 
some quiet chamber in the palace of Shushan, or to the deep 
shade of some tree in the gardens around the palace, to “pray 
his prayer day and night,” what an influence was he thereby 
putting forth upon the counsels of Artaxerxes, upon the distant 
Jerusalem and upon the future history of the kingdom of God, 
touching the first link in the chain on which all others depended, 
moving the hand that was moving the universe ! 

THE PRELIMINARY MEASURES TO THE BUILDING OF 
THE WALL. 

V. One of the most important of these was a deliberate survey 
of its ruined state and a calm estimate of the work to be effected. 
This was an obviously wise step before entering on so great an 
undertaking, in order that the difficulties might neither be in- 
juriously magnified nor unduly slighted. In the case of Nehe- 
miah, too, as of most men, there was an advantage in the heart 
being reached through the eye, and in the resolution being strung 
afresh through actual and impressive contact with the evil. 

And there is something at once pathetic and picturesque in the 
description which the narrative itself gives us of this Jewish 
patriot, mounted on his mule and moving by moonlight among 


NEIIEMIAH. 


439 


the ruined walls and broken gates of the city of his fathers. 
What histories ! — what memories of faded glories ! — what con- 
trite reflections on their moral causes ! — must have risen up in his 
brave but saddened heart as his shadow fell upon one part of the 
ruins after another! Those who had lived long in Jerusalem 
were apt to have become accustomed and in some degree recon- 
ciled to things as they were, and in consequence apathetic and 
indifferent. This Jew T from Shushan, looking upon the whole 
with a fresh eye, and having his mind filled with glowing pic- 
tures of Israel’s glorious past, would better measure and appre- 
ciate the proportions of the misery. 

And were one now coming, I shall not say from a distant 
country, but from a far-off world — an apostle from heaven — and 
taking a survey of the existing state of the spiritual Jerusalem, 
the Church of God, what would be his feelings and impressions? 
We are accustomed, and therefore too much reconciled, to exist- 
ing evils ; but how would they look to his fresh and divinely- 
illuminated eye? Would he not, in many parts of his survey, 
be like one gazing upon ruined walls and gates burnt with fire? 

The remaining part of the night would doubtless be given by 
Nehemiah to many thoughts and prayers ; the morrow, when it 
comes, must be devoted to stirring into action and binding in 
one his dispirited and divided fellow-countrymen. Though he 
bore with him the royal authority and commission requiring the 
people of Jerusalem to co-operate with him in his work, he was 
too brave a man to proceed upon mere authority, and too wise a 
man not to see that men wrought better from love than from 
fear, and that the union of hearts as well as hands in such an 
enterprise as that to which he had now consecrated himself was 
essential to success. And the arguments which he used with the 
chiefs and people when, on the next day, he summoned them 
together, were admirably fitted to stir into life their dormant 
energies, and to unite their hitherto disjointed ranks in one. 

He appealed to their distressed condition as seen in their walls 


440 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


and gates still in ruins, and bitterly felt, in the injuries and 
taunts not only against their nation but against their religion, to 
which these desolations daily exposed them from their heathen 
neighbors. He told them how, hearing in the far-distant palace 
of Shushan of their great affliction, he had been overwhelmed 
with grief at their depression and dishonor — how the purpose 
had gradually formed itself in his mind of coming to wipe away 
their reproach — how he had, many a day and night, asked “the 
God of heaven” to assist him by inclining the. heart of the Per- 
sian monarch to grant him the necessary authority and help for 
the building of their wall — and how the king had granted him 
his request in such a manner as to make it evident that “ the 
whole thing was of the Lord.” And now appearing in the midst 
of them with the combined authority of earth and heaven, he 
asked them whether they were prepared to take advantage of 
“the set time to favor Zion,” and arise with him and build 
the wall. 

This appeal at once to their patriotism and to their piety, to 
their shame, to their fears and hopes — this manifestation before 
them of a visible providence working in their behalf — made 
them as one man, and drew from them the loud and unanimous 
response, “ Let us rise up and build.” 

There are men of great souls and strong faith whose presence 
in a community is like that of a war-trumpet on the eve of battle, 
bracing all with stern and eager purpose. And such was Nehe- 
miah now among the people of Jerusalem. His holy energy and 
high hope became contagious; the people rose for the time to the 
moral level of their leader ; each was a sort of Nehemiah in his 
own sphere, and each helped to make stronger the hand and 
heart of his neighbor. And so the same day which had beheld 
them in the morning dispirited and disjointed — rulers, priests 
and people — found them, before the evening, hopeful and united, 
eager to have the foundation laid of that structure which should 
make their Jerusalem once more a defenced city and “ a praise 


NE HE MI A II. 


441 


in the whole earth.” “So they strengthened their hands for 
this good work.” 

THE PERSONS PARTICULARLY EMPLOYED IN THE BUILD- 
ING OF THE WALL. 

YT. It is pleasing to remark that among the first to catch the 
spirit of this great “restorer of the waste places of Jerusalem” 
were the priests and ministers of religion. We may imagine 
them to have often wept and mourned, like Nehemiah in the 
distant Shushan, over the desolations of their sacred city, and to 
have sent up to heaven many an earnest supplication for the 
time when, like their fathers, they should walk about Zion, 
and go round about her, consider her palaces, and mark well her 
bulwarks, that they might tell it to the generation following. 
The consequence was that when this devout patriot appeared 
suddenly in the midst of them, with his trumpet-call summoning 
them to this great work, there w r as no class of the community 
whose reception of him was more cordial. 

It has not generally been observed that they were the first to 
finish the building of their allotted portion of the wall, and that 
they “sanctified it” — that is, solemnly dedicated their work, 
when finished, to the divine honor, and acknowledged the de- 
pendence of the builders on God for the success of all that was to 
follow, their conduct reminding us of that beautiful act of laying 
upon the altar of God in the temple the first ripe sheaf of corn 
at the beginning of harvest, as an acknowledgment that “the 
earth was the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.” 

This promptitude and precedence of the ministers of religion 
in the undertaking was greatly to be desired, not only on their 
own account, but for the work’s sake. From the place of in- 
fluence which they occupied, they had much in their power either 
to hinder or to advance Nehemiah’s enterprise. And the proper 
place for ministers of religion in every work of holy zeal is in 
the vanguard of the movement, in the foremost ranks of the 


442 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


armies of the living God. If they move slowly, others will not 
move at all. But “their zeal will provoke very many.” A 
thousand torches will be kindled at their lamp. The holy 
anointing “oil upon the head of Aaron will descend upon his 
beard, and even to the skirts of his garments.” 

The nobles and rulers also appear to have thrown themselves 
with becoming ardor into the movement; though it is among 
them that we meet with an exception in the instance of the 
Tekoan nobles, who “put not their necks to the work of the 
Lord,” but stood aloof from an enterprise which was making the 
nation’s heart young again, and in which their elevated rank and 
privileged position should have given them all the deeper an in- 
terest. It is surely not to be overlooked that, in the chapter 
which records the names and exploits of the builders, a brand is 
placed over those Tekoan chiefs, and that they are thus hung in 
chains and held up to perpetual shame and infamy. But it is 
seasonable, at the same time, to remember that there is another 
book of God in which all our acts are in process of being re- 
corded — a book in which there are no omissions or errors, and 
from which there shall be no erasures — the book which shall be 
opened at the last day, and out of which we shall be judged — in 
which neglected opportunities of “coming forth to the help of 
the Lord” shall be found impartially reported, and the cup of 
cold water given to a disciple in the name of a disciple shall be 
placed in everlasting remembrance. 

But then, as if to balance this proud and selfish indifference 
on the part of the Tekoan nobles, we find the mass of the com- 
munity animated by one heart and soul of patriotism and cheer- 
ful activity — particular classes of them, such as the goldsmiths, 
the apothecaries and the merchants forming themselves into com- 
panies and building such large portions of the wall as extended 
between two gates ; the representatives from neighboring towns 
and villages and rural districts willingly offering themselves for 
other parts of the work ; even the solitary lodger in his chamber 


NEHEMIAH. 


443 


building that part of the wall which was over against his own 
dwelling; and the high-souled daughters of certain of the rulers 
throwing off for a time the retiring spirit and the domestic habits 
of their sex, and, in some form of personal effort, helping to sur- 
round with a wall of defence the city of their fathers and the 
temple of their God. 

It was a grand and animating spectacle to behold these three 
miles of wall crowded with busy companies of ungrudging 
laborers, and a joyous sound to hear the noise of hammer and 
mallet and the hum of industry all round the wide circuit from 
the earliest dawn of day until “the stars of heaven appeared .” 
It was, in fact, a revival season, in which something of the best 
days of David and Solomon had returned upon the people. 

We do not read that Nehemiah himself was engaged in the 
actual work of rebuilding any part of the wall, but he took the 
general oversight and guidance of the whole ; and as Mr. Henry 
has said, “we do not expect the pilot to hale at a rope; it is 
enough for him to steer.” He was the presiding genius and ani- 
mating soul of the enterprise, to whom all looked, like a tried 
general on some great battle-field, in whose single arm there 
appeared to sleep the secret of victory. 

We may imagine him now standing on some elevated part of 
Mount Zion, overlooking the whole busy scene, and sending 
messages to the leaders and their companies on different portions 
of the wall ; now walking his rounds among the builders, smiling 
on the earnest, prompting the laggard, and having some “ word 
fitly spoken” for all; and again watching the movements of the 
enemy, who at one time hovered like a cloud in the distance, and 
again drew nearer to the work. And while every eye upon the 
wall turns often to Nehemiah, his eye is turned oftener yet to 
another Onlooker from the skies, even to Him who has put it 
into his heart to build ; and as he realizes his power and promise, 
he rises above all faint-heartedness and fear, and exclaims anew, 
“ The God of heaven, he will prosper us.” 


444 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


The application of these facts to the promotion and extension 
of the true religion is obvious and interesting. The walls of the 
Christian Church are now in process of erection, and have been 
so for thousands of years. Portions of these walls are beginning 
to appear above the surface of the earth in many lands, and every 
converted man has some particular work to do in helping forward 
the sacred enterprise to completion and triumph. 

The picture of the solitary lodger building over against his 
own chamber may be regarded as giving sanction and encourage- 
ment to individual effort. The particular companies, under 
qualified leaders, undertaking the erection of larger portions of 
the wall, may be held as representing properly-organized congre- 
gations and well-equipped missionary societies in their systematic 
endeavors to advance the vital interests of the kingdom of God 
at home and to establish and extend Christian missions in foreign 
countries. While the fact that merchants and artisans had their 
allotted sphere in the building of the wall may surely be em- 
ployed to suggest that they too, as well as the ministers of 
religion, have their own work to do in repairing the waste places 
of the spiritual Jerusalem. It was the liberality of a Christian 
merchant which helped Tyndale to translate the Bible into the 
English tongue, when he was refused protection and hospitality 
in the house of a bishop who would not “ set his neck to the 
work of the Lord;” and the holy zeal and courage of other 
merchants brought copies of his Bible in thousands into the sea- 
ports of England after it had been translated. No one, in fact, 
has warrant to be idle, but in some form or other must put forth 
his hand and build. 

It was no holiday work, however, to which Nehemiah and his 
compatriots had consecrated themselves. It could not be said of 
the wall, as in Heber’s beautiful line respecting the temple of 
Solomon, that it grew in a sort of serene silence — 

“Like some tall palm the mystic fabric sprung;” 
but, from the laying of the foundation to the putting on of the 


NEHEMIAH. 


445 


copcstone, it was met by opposition and difficulty, and grew 
“ in troublous times.” 

THE OPPOSITION WHICH THE BUILDING OF THE WALL 
ENCOUNTERED. 

VII. This opposition came principally from the mixed and 
idolatrous tribes by whom Jerusalem was at this time sur- 
rounded, the names of whose leaders have been given to per- 
petual infamy in Nehemiah’s own narrative — Sanballat the 
Horonite, Tobiah the Ammonite, and Geshem the Arabian. 
One of the principal forms in which their enmity showed itself 
was the casting of ridicule upon the enterprise and the builders, 
slighting the attempt as impracticable with such means and in 
the face of such resistance as they would be sure to meet, and 
doing what they could to spread discouragement and consequent 
division among the workers by prophesying the failure which 
they desired. “What do these feeble Jews?” exclaimed San- 
ballat, contemptuously ; “will they fortify themselves ? will they 
revive the stones out of the heaps of the rubbish which are 
burned?” while Tobiah the Ammonite tried to better the evil 
prophecies of his ally by something more contemptuous and sar- 
castic still : “ Even that which they build, if a fox go up, he shall 
even break down their stone wall.” 

In all this we have an example of the terms of incredulity and 
scorn in which men without religion often speak of Christian 
efforts for the highest good of the world. “ It is only a fit of 
momentary enthusiasm,” they will tell us; or if perseverance 
contradicts this, then we are assured that the work is imprac- 
ticable, and that a few feeble worms might as soon attempt to 
level the Alps into a plain. In this way they are ever measuring 
spiritual forces by a mere material standard which cannot be 
applied to them, and constantly finding their “glory turned 
into shame.” 

Other forms of opposition and discouragement, having their 


446 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


parallel also in the history and experience of the Christian 
Church, beset the movements of Nehemiah and his builders, the 
greater number of them being organized or prompted by those 
sleepless adversaries from without. Now they were threatened 
with sudden and simultaneous assault ; again, the enemy made 
secret efforts to find an entrance into the city and to stop the 
work of the Lord. To-day, conspiracies were formed on various 
pretences to draw Nehemiah into their toils, some false-hearted 
men among the Jews themselves helping the treacherous attempt; 
to-morrow, the report was spread that in all this Nehemiah was 
plotting rebellion against Artaxerxes, and that he intended to 
make himself their king; a third day, some faint-hearted men 
of Judah came to him and sought to palsy him and his people 
with their craven fears. 

Notwithstanding, in the midst of all these discouragements 
and obstructions, the brave soul of this heroic man never 
quailed ; the wall rose like a thing of life, every new day marking 
progress, and in less than two months the holy city was girded 
round with its defences ; its ten massive gates were set up, and 
men could walk on its summits, and looking forth on their dis- 
appointed and astonished adversaries, could see how the dismay 
and reproach with which they had sought to confound and cover 
them had returned into their own bosoms. 

THE SPIRIT AND THE MEANS BY WHICH THE BUILDING 
OF THE WALL WAS ' CARRIED ON. 

VIII. 1. One interesting feature in the operations of these 
builders was subdivision of labor combined with harmony of 
aim. Each organized company of workers had its own place on 
the wall assigned to it, and each person in that company had his 
own allotted part of the work to do, and did it. In like manner, 
the solitary laborer fell in with the general arrangements and 
concentrated his energies on the part of the wall that was given 
him to build. By this means it was secured that there should 


NEHEMIAH. 


447 


be no superfluity of labor in one place, and no proportionate lack 
in another ; that there should be no jostling or crossing of each 
other’s path on the part of the workers; and that the full 
strength of the great host of builders should be elicited to the 
utmost without any waste of power. 

But while each individual and company thus kept to their 
allotted sphere and place on the wall, the interest of each ex- 
tended over the entire structure. Each rejoiced in the success 
of his neighbor, and felt that he was co-operating with all for 
one great and common end. 

It should be thus with Christians and Christian churches in 
spreading the gospel over the world. There should everywhere 
be a friendly recognition of each other’s services and success. If 
one has already begun to build on one part of the wall, we 
should pass him with a kindly greeting and benediction, and go 
and work where as yet there is no builder. “ If thou wilt go 
to the right hand, then I will go to the left.” While, with a 
good will, that embraces in it all honest workers for Christ, our 
prayers should extend over the whole circuit of Christian mis- 
sions all round the globe, and find frequent utterance to the cry^ 
“ Let the whole earth be filled with his glory. Amen, and 
amen.” 

2. Nor should the remarkable circumstance be overlooked, 
because of the important lesson which it suggests, that wherever 
a man’s house stood in proximity to the wall, he began by build- 
ing that portion of the wall which stood over against his own 
house. For how naturally does the observation grow out of this 
fact, that personal religion and family piety ought to precede and 
accompany all other and more extensive efforts for building up 
the cause of Christ in the world, and that the man who is setting 
a holy and consistent Christian example in his own social sphere, 
and the parent who is sending forth morally-trained and Chris- 
tianly-educated children upon the world is doing not a little foi 
building up the walls of Jerusalem ! 


448 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


3. The whole mass of the people seem to have given them- 
selves with undivided will to this work of pious patriotism. 
With some insignificant exceptions, the heart of the entire city, 
in every rank and age of its population, was stirred to its very 
centre, and moved to rise up and build. The idlers, and grum- % 
biers, and prophets of evil days, and procrastinators who said, 
“This is not the time to build, ” were transmuted, if not by prin- 
ciple, yet by the power of a common sympathy, into better men. 
The whole strength of Jerusalem, mental, moral and physical, 
was concentrated on that wall, for “the people had a mind to 
work.” 

4. But nothing was more remarkable in Nehemiah and his 
builders, or more contributed to the success of their enterprise, 
than their spirit of prayerful perseverance and unwavering con- 
fidence in God. We saw the first sublime purpose of building 
the wall formed with prayer in the heart of Nehemiah while he 
was still in the distant Shushan ; multitudes of the people appear 
to have been raised in some degree to the religious level of their 
leader- when he came among them ; the consequence of all which 
was that the whole sublime enterprise which had been begun in 
prayer also continued and was ended in it: “ Hear, O our God, 
for we are despised.” “Think upon me, my God, for good.” 

“ Now therefore, O God, strengthen my hands.” 

This spirit did not make them cease from watching the schemes 
and movements of their enemies, but it kept them from fearing 
them. It did not withhold them from the use of every means 
that seemed adapted for their defence and safety; for Nehemiah 
tells us that they “ watched as well as prayed,” and that even 
while they stood on the wall and built, they had a sword girded 
on their side, ready to be drawn against every Horonite or 
Ammonite or Arabian that might seek to stop the work of the 
Lord. But it made them hopeful of divine protection when 
these means were used, and effectually preserved them from all 
fainting of heart or feebleness of hand, even when their enemies 


NEUEMIAIT. 


449 


were boldest and their difficulties and discouragements at the 
worst. 

And joined with all these thoughts and exercises, the con- 
sideration which made Nehemiah strong, and by which he made 
the people united and invincible, was, that they were working 
and fighting on God’s side, by God’s command and with God’s 
promised help : “ The God of heaven, he will prosper us.” “ Be 
not ye afraid of them : remember the Lord which is great and 
terrible.” And as a good man once said, “ What God calls a 
man to do, he will carry him through. I would undertake to 
govern half a dozen worlds if God called me to do it, but I 
would not undertake to govern half a dozen sheep unless God 
called me to do it.” 

It is remarkable how this consciousness of laboring and fight- 
ing in God’s cause and by God’s command has sometimes im- 
parted to a whole people a kind of supernatural strength, and 
given them an invincibility and a power which no mere earthly 
element could ever have communicated. In the brightest times 
of Jewish history, it enabled the chosen race to “ do exploits, and 
to turn to flight the armies of the aliens.” And what armies, in 
the annals of our own nation, ever proved themselves so in- 
vincible as those in whom natural bravery was refined, elevated 
and confirmed by the sense of a divine cause and by religious 
fervor? “Call you this madness? Madness lies close by, as 
madness does to the highest wisdom in man’s life always ; but 
this is not mad. The dark element; it is the mother of the 
lightnings and the splendors ; it is very sure, this.” 

29 



XXXVII. 

SIMEON. 

E at once dismiss from our notice those numerous 
childish legends and crude fancies that have descended 
in the false gospels and in other ancient but un- 
authorized writings regarding this venerable man, and 
form our mental portrait of him from the few bold outlines that 
have been sketched by Luke ; only remarking that nothing tends 
to produce a stronger presumption in proof of the inspiration of 
the four Gospels than the contrast which their contents, and even 
their wise reticence, afford, to those garrulous traditions which 
have dared to borrow their name. The two classes of writings 
are not separated from each other by a faint and shadowy out- 
line, but by a distance almost as great as that which stretches 
between heaven and earth. 

Simeon is described by Luke as “ a just and devout man 
that is, one who united in his character habitual integrity in his 
transactions and intercourse among men, with sincere and un- 
affected piety toward God. The two classes of duties should be 
regarded by us as inseparable as Christ’s seamless robe; and 
where there is true love to God in the heart, there will be no 
attempt to separate them. When Solomon, in that memorable 
judgment which made him famous throughout the land, called 
for a sword and proposed to divide the child in two and give a 
half to each of the two women who pretended to be its mother, 

450 



SIMEON. 


451 


the true mother was at once revealed in her who would on no 
account consent to the separation. 

Simeon is further represented as “ waiting for the consolation 
of Israel.” This was one of the most common and beautiful 
names with which good men in those times were accustomed to 
speak of the Messiah. I do not think that the designation was 
derived from any particular passage in the ancient Scriptures, 
but rather from the characteristic practice of the prophets, in all 
times of present calamity or of near and foreseen distress, to en- 
courage and support their countrymen by the prospect of the 
coming of Christ. In the darkest night of Jewish adversity this 
light was kept shining above the horizon, to keep the hearts of 
individuals from fainting and the national hope from sinking; 
as when Isaiah introduced one of the most glowing pictures of 
the advent and kingdom of the Messiah with these words: 
“Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God.” The 
universal voice of all prophecy respecting Christ might be re- 
garded as gathering itself into one in this beautifully tender 
description of him as “the consolation of Israel.” 

Now, innumerable facts make it evident that there was a 
general expectation spread over the whole Jewish nation at this 
period of the early appearance of the Messiah. But among the 
mass of the people this sentiment had more in it of a kind of 
wild patriotism than of religious aspiration, and mainly con- 
sisted in a desire for national independence and an ambition 
for temporal aggrandizement. The national mind imagined in 
itself a Messiah and a gospel like to itself. But in the midst 
of this, there was a little band whose conceptions of Christ and 
his kingdom were far more scriptural and spiritual, and who, if 
they entertained hopes of temporal advantage from the advent 
to their nation — as we know some of them did — yet, in their 
stronger desires and more intense longings, wished for the great 
event chiefly because of its religious benefits to themselves and to 
others. To this little company belonged Zacharias and Elisabeth, 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


to: 


the eleven faithful apostles, Simeon and others. They were a 
church within the Church — the true Israel of those times — 
dwelling on 

“A little spot enclosed by grace, 

Saved from the world’s vast wilderness.” 

Diligent students of prophecy and devout observers of provi- 
dence, they watched the signs of the approaching King which 
might be read in these two heavens with more absorbing interest 
than astronomer kept vigil on the movements of the stars. Oh, 
to behold Him whose coming had, four thousand years before, 
been the subject of divine promise at the gates of Eden — whose 
day, beheld from afar by Abraham in the gray dawn-time, had 
made the great patriarch’s heart glad — who had been the theme 
of Daniel’s most magnificent revelations, of Isaiah’s grandest 
pictures, of David’s noblest psalms — whose name had evoked the 
richest notes from the lyre of ancient prophecy, whatever seer’s 
hand swept its strings — who was to be the reality and the sub- 
stance of all types and ceremonies — who was to bind up the 
bleeding wounds of his own Israel and to give a new life to the 
world ! “ We have waited for thy salvation, O Lord.” 

“ O living Sun ! with joy break forth, 

And pierce the gloomy clefts of earth ; 

Behold the mountains melt away 
Like wax beneath thine ardent ray. 

“O Life-dew of the churches! come 
And bid this arid desert bloom; 

The sorrows of thy people see, 

And take our human flesh on thee.” 

These sublime desires of Simeon and of other holy watchers 
of his times were themselves the harbingers of the approaching 
Christ; according to the beautiful saying of Leighton, that a 
good father awakes his children when he knows that it is near to 
sunrise. 

And another law of the divine kingdom was now to be exem- 
plified in this venerable saint. For just as those who climb to 


SIMEON. 


453 


the top of the mountain catch the rays of the great luminary 
while others are still sleeping in darkness in the valley beneath, 
so is it the manner of our Father in heaven to satisfy the longing 
soul with the most abundant knowledge of himself. I conceive 
Simeon to have by this time become an old man with hoary head 
and snow-white beard, and while he had already, through the 
study of providence and prophecy and the illuminations of the 
divine Spirit helping him “ to attain to something of prophetic 
strain,” been brought to the firm belief that it was near the dawn 
of the kingdom of God, there mingled with this joyful conviction 
the fear that he should not be allowed to remain so long on earth 
as to behold “ the Lord’s Christ come to his own.” By a special 
revelation he is assured that this reigning wish of his heart shall 
be satisfied to the full ; that the grave shall have no power to 
claim his dust until he has “ hailed the rise of this better Sun 
that “ he shall not see death until he has seen the Lord’s Christ.” 

II. The manner in which this remarkably gracious promise 
was accomplished now falls to be considered by us. It is just- 
thirty days since Jesus had been born at Bethlehem, and now 
Joseph and Mary, in conformity with one of the most beautiful 
appointments of the Jewish ceremonial, appear in the temple at 
Jerusalem to present their infant before the Lord. The origin 
of this custom stands historically connected with that memorable 
night of the deliverance of the Israelites from their Egyptian 
bondage, when the Lord smote every first-born child of the 
Egyptians, but saved every first-born child of the Israelites 
alive. In grateful commemoration of that great event, every 
first-born male child among the Jews was appointed to be “holy 
to the Lord.” And when, at a later period of the nation’s his- 
tory, God chose the members of the tribe of Levi, in room of the 
first-born, as sacred to his service; still, in order to keep alive 
among the Israelites the remembrance of this original arrange- 
ment and of the ground on which it rested, the first-born of every 


f 


454 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


family was required to be presented before the Lord in the temple, 
and redeemed by a money payment of five shekels. 

It is to discharge this seemly service that Mary now enters the 
temple, accompanied by her husband Joseph, and bearing in her 
arms the infant Christ. But in what profound and varied mean- 
ings, of which those parents themselves could only as yet have 
the most dim apprehensions, might it be said of this child that 
he was “holy to the Lord”! He was, in truth, the only per- 
fectly holy child that had ever been born, absolutely free from 
every taint of sin — “ that holy thing,” as the angel had called 
him when he foretold his birth to his wondering mother ; whose 
future earthly life was not to need, like that of other children, to 
have its errors corrected and its depravity uprooted, but to be the 
gradual unfolding, amid the mists and damps of earth, of a celes- 
tial flower that should “shed around it the fragrance of other 
worlds.” Moreover, this child was to be the temple of the 
divinity in whom should “ dwell all the fullness of the Godhead 
bodily,” and, as the servant of his divine Father in the economy 
of grace, was to be the Saviour of men, and to bear upon his 
shoulder the government of the Church and of the universe. In 
sober truth it might be said that in his higher nature he had pre- 
sented himself before his Father in the eternal counsels of peace 
“ere ever the earth was,” and then had consecrated himself to 
the stupendous work of mercy for which he had now taken our 
humanity upon him and come into the world. 

This consecration had indeed been announced from the begin- 
ning of time in continually-expanding prophecy, in which a voice 
seemed ever to cry, “ Lo, I come.” And now behold the words 
of Malachi are fulfilled : “ The Lord whom ye seek shall sud- 
denly come to his temple;” and his presence in it is enough to 
make this second temple more glorious by far than the first. 
Everything that is placed in this sacred structure, everything 
that is performed in it — its furniture, its sacrifices, its waving of 
incense, its various other rites — are but the pictures and shadows 


SIMEON. 


455 


of what he is or of what he is to be. The temple is, in this view 
of it, like a vast apartment covered with mirrors, every one of 
which reflects his image. And yet there is nothing now in his 
outward appearance to indicate his hidden greatness. There is 
no play of a visible glory upon his infant countenance to distin- 
guish him from other children. On the other hand, there are the 
marks of poverty and humiliation. His parents are so poor that 
his youthful mother has been obliged to substitute a pair of 
turtle-doves or two young pigeons as the alternative offering in 
room of the lamb which mothers were required to offer in con- 
nection with the rite of purification. For 

“Thou didst come, 

O holiest! to this world of sin and gloom, 

Not in thy dread omnipotent array ; 

And not by thunder strewed 
Was thy tempestuous road, 

Nor indignation burned before thee on thy way. 

But thee, a soft and naked child, 

Thy mother undefiled 

In the rude manger laid to rest, 

From off her virgin breast.” 

"Who, then, shall be the first to welcome the infant King to his 
palace — the Lord to his temple ? 

While the humble parents are proceeding with this seemly 
act, the aged Simeon enters the courts of the Lord’s house, and 
is the first of all human beings to hail in the temple the presence 
of its divine owner. It had been his practice and his delight to 
frequent these sacred gates — a he had been there and still would 
go but he is led hither on this particular occasion by a special 
divine impulse. As we call to mind the words of the evangelist, 
that “the Holy Ghost was upon him,” and that “he came by the 
Spirit into the temple,” we may picture to ourselves the venerable 
saint and seer, in Milton’s grand words, as coming in 
“ With even step and musing gait, 

An<J looks commercing with the skies, 

His rapt soul sitting in his eyes.” 


456 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


He turns to the virgin mother holding her infant in her arms 
in the attitude of presentation, and is unerringly and instantly 
led by the Spirit to recognize in the child the “ desire of nations” 
and the “ consolation of Israel.” It is an idle question to ask in 
what manner Simeon became assured of this fact ; for surely if 
the human architect who plans and builds a material structure is 
acquainted with its most hidden apartments, and knows all its 
exits and its entrances, how much more must He who made the 
human soul have modes of acting upon it of which we are igno- 
rant, and know the way to its most secret springs ? 

It is of more importance to remark that the manner in which 
Simeon recognized the infant Redeemer affords a striking proof 
of the strength of his faith. He was not offended at his lowly 
circumstances, or stumbled by the absence of every outward mark 
of his divine royalty. If it be said that the supernatural im- 
pression under which he acted sufficiently accounts for this, it 
ought to be remembered that there have been men who, after 
receiving a divine communication and listening to a heavenly 
voice, have immediately asked for an additional sign in order to 
confirm their faith. We therefore account in great part for 
Simeon’s prompt and unhesitating recognition of the Christ in 
this lowly child by the fact that he had long been so devout and 
diligent a student of the Old Testament Scriptures. There his 
mental “ eye had been anointed with eye-salve,” and he had been 
taught to look for a suffering Messiah ; “ for the secret of the 
Lord is with them that fear him.” These outward signs of 
humiliation had accordingly no effect in disturbing his faith or 
damping his joy. Yea, not content with seeing the holy child in 
the arms of his mother, in the fine exuberance and almost ecstasy 
of his gratitude, the aged saint takes the infant into his own 
withered arms, embraces him, presses him to his heart, and sends 
up an ascription of praise to God which the Church for eighteen 
hundred years has treasured as among the richest utterances of 
inspired worship. 


SIMEON. 


457 


The outward exercise was, in fact, a most beautiful reflection 
and expression of the inward sentiment — a kind of enacted faith. 
For what is saving faith but a recognition of Christ as the 
divinely-appointed and divine Saviour, and a grateful appropria- 
tion of him as our Saviour ? Do not love to Christ and joy in 
him mingle with faith as its first-fruits? And out of the abun- 
dance of the heart does not the mouth speak in “ thanks unto 
God for his unspeakable gift” ? 

III. Let us now meditate on the ascription by Simeon — “ the 
swan-song of the seer of the old covenant,” as it has been happily 
called. 

And those who meditate upon it with intelligence will not fail 
to be struck with the enlarged conceptions which he had formed 
of the extent to which the benefits of the Messiah’s kingdom were 
designed to reach. For it is worthy of particular remark that 
in the various divine songs and thanksgivings in connection 
with the Saviour’s birth which came from hallowed lips that 
had been touched with celestial fire — the inspired hymns of the 
nativity, as they might be fitly called — there was a progressive 
expansion of the scope of vision. Thus Mary’s own hymn dwelt 
mainly upon the personal blessings and honors which the advent 
of the Christ was to bring to herself. The song of Zacharias 
celebrated its benefits to Abraham’s race. In what Simeon now 
says in this grand burst of praise he goes far beyond them, and 
rising to an elevation and a range of view which were only 
reached by the apostles themselves after their Lord’s resurrection 
and ascension, speaks, in his holy rapture, of Christ as “ God’s 
salvation, prepared before the face of all people; a light to 
lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of his people Israel.” 

He was emphatically “ the glory of his people Israel,” inas- 
much as in his human relation he was one of themselves, of the 
seed of Abraham and the family of David. And far above the 
fact that God had taken them for so many ages into covenant 


458 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


with himself — that they had received the law immediately from 
his hand amid the awful scenes and symbols of Sinai — that they 
had been the chosen guardians of the inspired oracles and cus- 
todians of the true worship — the apostle names it as the very 
climax and crown of their honor as a people that “of them, as 
concerning the flesh, Christ had come, who was over all, God 
blessed for ever.” 

And when Simeon further speaks of Jesus as “a light to 
lighten the Gentiles/’ he describes the true mission of his gospel 
as a world’s religion, intended to drive away all error and super- 
stition and idolatry and sin and misery from the earth, to bring 
men of every race and clime to the true knowledge of God, and 
to the enjoyment of happiness through the knowledge of himself. 

His blessed words afford new evidence of the unwonted famil- 
iarity of Simeon with the lively oracles, for they echo back 
through the centuries those sublime words in which God had 
been prophetically represented as addressing the Messiah : “ Jt 
is a light thing that thou shouldest be my servant, to raise up 
the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of Israel ; I will 
also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my 
salvation unto the end of the earth.” And they further prove to 
us that the narrow notions commonly entertained by the Jews of 
those times, as if the benefits of Christ’s kingdom were to be re- 
stricted to their nation, were, in fact, a degeneracy from the true 
faith, and a selfish lapsing from the expansive and benignant 
hopes of the best men under the older economy. 

That sight of the “salvation of God” more than reconciled 
Simeon to the thought of dying. It had been promised to him 
that he “should not see death until he had seen the Lord’s 
Christ,” and this blessed hour had seen the promise fulfilled; 
but the very terms of the promise seemed also to indicate that 
the sight of Christ would mark the^term of his continuance upon 
earth. And now that his arms at length embraced his Lord, he 
“ could leave the world without a tear.” It was enough for him 


SIMEON. 


459 


to have lived to witness this spectacle of the world’s light and 
deliverer: “Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, ac- 
cording to thy word: for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.” 
It is not a prayer for dismissal from the world, but a thankful 
utterance of belief that the hour of his departure is at hand, and 
a tranquil confidence that when that hour arrives, it will be a 
peaceful passing away from service to glory, honor and immor- 
tality. Even a pagan prince, in a day of great honor to his 
country, could exclaim, in a burst of patriotic gladness, “ Satis 
est vixisse” (“It is sufficient for me to have lived to behold 
this”). Old Jacob, too, when his favorite son was restored to 
him after an interval of many checkered and sorrowful years in 
which he had believed him to be dead, had said with touching 
paternal tenderness, “ Now let me die, since I have seen thy face, 
because thou art yet alive.” But Simeon, in what he now said, 
had infinitely better warrant for his words. A believing sight 
of Christ is that which enables us to look the king of terrors in 
the face without dread. With him embraced in the arras of our 
faith, we have the sure pledge of heaven, for “ he that hath the 
Son hath life.” 

We cannot tell with anything like definiteness how far Simeon 
was enlightened in reference to the great facts of the Saviour’s 
earthly history which were to form the basis and root of the con- 
solations of his gospel ; but he knew in general that he was to de- 
liver his people from all their spiritual enemies, and that of these 
enemies death was one of the most formidable and the last ; and 
this confidence breathed a life of joy through all these exulting 
words. But Christians who look back upon Christ’s completed 
earthly life may now take up Simeon’s ascription and sing it 
with a louder, sweeter note than his, for in his death they behold 
the ransom-price of their redemption, and in his resurrection and 
ascension the divine assurance of their own immortality and 
heavenly reward. The valley of the shadow of death has been 
lighted up by him all through with the undying lamps of his 


4G0 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


own exceeding great and precious promises ; and when the dying 
saint passes from their light, it will be into the midst of the un- 
speakably brighter light of that “ city which hath no need of the 
sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it; for the glory of God 
doth lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof.” 

“How dreary would old age be,” said John Foster once, 
“without the doctrine of the atonement! The exclusion of this 
from Christianity would reduce me instantly to black despair.” 
But the belief of this truth, and of all that it draws after it, 
transmutes the dismal grave into a bed of spices, and “dying” 
is seen to be but “going home.” We do not wonder that the 
Christians of earlier ages treated the funeral of their brethren as 
a kind of triumphal procession, and that Christians in the East 
preferred planting over the graves of their holy kindred the 
triumphal palm rather than the gloomy cypress. Those who 
have visited the catacombs at Rome, and compared the inscrip- 
tions on the tombs of heathens and of Christians, have been 
struck with the contrast between the despair of the one and the 
calm joy of the other. Here is thick shadow; there settled light. 
The sight which Simeon now beheld produced and explained the 
difference, for “ blessed are the dead which die in the Lord.” 

The words of the rapt seer filled Mary and her husband with 
astonishment, especially when they added to these the earlier 
testimonies that had been given respecting their child. But they 
thought far more than they spoke. They could not fully com- 
prehend the meaning of such language; it shone before them 
with an indistinct grandeur. They waited, therefore, the gradual 
interpretation of providential events, well assured that such utter- 
ances must be precursors of a most glorious history. But was 
there no danger, if this was all that was spoken, that our Lord’s 
parents might be unduly elated by these revelations if they stood 
alone, or, at all events, that those sufferings of Jesus which were 
to precede the preaching of his gospel and the extension of his 
kingdom might disturb and even shake the Virgin’s faith if she 


SIMEON. 


461 


were not forewarned of them ? Accordingly, we find that Simeon 
proceeds with other inspired sayings necessary to the truthful 
shading of the picture. The wind of the Spirit passing over his 
soul causes it to emit sounds in which sadness largely mingles 
with joy. 

IY. We now listen, then, to his prophecy. Having blessed 
them — that is, declared them to be blessed — Simeon said unto 
Mary, “ Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of 
many in Israel ; and for a sign which shall be spoken against 
(yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also), that the 
thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” This prophetic 
saying contains a reference to the Jewish nation, and describes 
the opposite effects which the appearance of Christ and his re- 
ligion in the midst of them would produce, and a special reference 
to the Virgin personally. 

When it is here declared that Christ was “ set for the fall and 
rising again of many in Israel,” some have imagined the lan- 
guage to describe the various stages in a soul’s conversion, in 
which there are first the throes and anguish of conviction of sin, 
or the deep abasement of conscious ill-desert, and then the joys 
of faith and of acceptance with God. “ For he hath torn, and he 
will heal us ; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up.” 

It has been supposed by others that we have here two pictures 
of the future of the Israelitish nation ; in the foreground, the 
tremendous judgments which the general rejection of Christ by 
that people would invoke upon them — judgments unparalleled 
alike in their severity and in their duration; and then in the 
background, the general repentance of that people, when they 
should return into the Church with the fullness of the Gentiles, 
when God would “lead his outcasts home,” and they should 
“ receive double for all their sins.” 

But it seems greatly more probable, when we place the dif- 
ferent clauses of the inspired oracle together, that they were 


462 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


intended to forecast the different kind of treatment which Christ 
and his gospel would receive from different classes of men. 
Many would recognize and welcome him ; but others would 
oppose his cause and shut their eyes against his light, so much so 
that he might be described as a sign which should be spoken 
against — a butt or mark set up, against which multitudes would 
direct the shafts of bitter ridicule, of blind unbelief and malig- 
nant persecution. “ Lo, the wicked would bend their bow, and 
make it ready; they would prepare their arrows against the 
innocent.” 

And operating in these directly opposite forms, into whatever 
community or circle the religion of Christ came, it would prove 
an infallible moral test of men’s characters. “ The thoughts of 
many hearts would thereby be revealed.” For Christ, being the 
revealer of God — his express moral image in so complete a man- 
ner that “ he that hath seen him hath seen the Father also” — and 
Christ’s gospel and doctrine being the fullest and clearest revela- 
tion of God that ever was given to the world, it must be evident 
that the manner of their reception by different men showed with 
unerring certainty what was in them. 

It was so during our Lord’s ministry. Those who were de- 
voutly “ waiting for the consolation of Israel” — who were longing 
for deliverance from their sins — the men of spiritual susceptibili- 
ties and tastes — were attracted toward him, as to a mighty mag- 
net, as soon as he was manifested. But on the other hand, in 
demanding of all his disciples a religion of the heart, and holding 
out to men a gratuitous mercy which humbled while it saved, 
Christ and his religion provoked the opposition of the proud and 
formal Pharisee ; while, in requiring his followers to deny them- 
selves and renounce every sinful inclination, were it dear even as 
a right hand or a right eye, he as certainly aroused against him 
the resentment and the scorn of the sensual Sadducee. 

The representation of the gospel as meeting with these opposite 
kinds of treatment from men according to the nature of their 


SIMEON. 


463 


reigning dispositions, and thus acting, wherever it comes, as a 
touchstone of moral character, and in the very fact of revealing 
God becoming also a revelation of man, is by no means con- 
fined to these words of Simeon. The Bible, in both its parts, is 
full of it. To some, Christ was to be a foundation-stone, to 
others a stumbling-stone; to some he is to be a sanctuary, to 
others a snare; to some his gospel was to be “ the savor of life 
unto life,” to others 11 the savor of death unto death.” He was 
set for the rising of many, but also for the fall of many in Israel. 

We must take good heed, however, that we receive the truth 
with scriptural discrimination. The natural tendency and the 
proper effect of the gospel is to save men. But just as men may 
abuse and pervert others of God’s gifts, such as health and talent 
and worldly competence, so it is possible, through persistent un- 
belief that hates the light in proportion as it loves sin, to turn 
the very “ grace of God which bringeth salvation” into a means 
of their destruction. And on these accounts the gospel never 
leaves any man who hears it, morally, where it found him. If 
it do not save him, it will righteously aggravate his condemna- 
tion. u If I had not come, and done many mighty works among 
them, they had not had sin ; but now they have no cloak for 
their sin.” The eternal doom of Sodom and Gomorrah will be 
nothing to that of the Christ-despiser. 

These prophetic sayings of Simeon must have carried some- 
thing of sorrowful surprise into the heart of Mary. But how 
would her amazement be deepened when she heard him inter- 
mingle with these that special warning to herself — “ Yea, a sword 
shall pierce through thy own soul also” ! Whatever minor ful- 
fillment these words may have received during our Lord’s public 
ministry, in the injuries and insults to which she saw her divine 
Son subjected, their prophetic meaning unquestionably culmi- 
nated in the dark hours of his crucifixion, when, as we are ex- 
pressly told, “ Mary stood by the cross of Jesus.” She could 
not behold him receive a wound, or hear him utter a groan, 


464 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


without her maternal heart being pierced through as with a 
sword. Ah ! what must have been that virgin-mother’s anguish 
for such a Son, when even the sun above suffered unnatural 
eclipse, the earth shuddered with pain, and, as has been grandly 
said, “ there were the funeral griefs of the worlds” ! Let no one 
presumptuously complain that it would have been better to have 
hidden this predestined agony from Mary until it came. The 
prediction might arise to her recollection in the hour of her 
anguish, and keep her faith from sinking, so that, unless she had 
“ hidden this word in her heart,” she might have “ perished in 
her affliction.” These were the shadows on this prophetic pic- 
ture; but the light immeasurably exceeded the shadows, in the 
promise of the extending and ultimately universal triumphs of 
the Messiah’s kingdom, that he “ should be a light to lighten 
the Gentiles, and the glory of his people Israel.” 

We now recur to the great central fact of the narrative, for the 
purpose of remarking that, in the Lord’s Supper, we do in spirit 
what Simeon now did. In receiving the bread and wine, which 
are the appointed symbols of Christ and his atoning death, we 
by faith receive Christ himself, appropriate and embrace him as 
our Saviour. He who does this need not fear death nor any 
evil, for “ there is no condemnation to them that are in Christ 
Jesus.” Let him who reads this ask the question of his own 
soul, “Have I embraced the Lord’s Christ?” Particularly, let 
aged saints who are standing on the verge of the grave — on 
whose head the almond tree doth flourish— -to whom the grass- 
hopper has become a burden, and on whom eternity is beginning 
to throw its mysterious gleams through the growing shades of 
evening-life — cultivate the mental attitude and exercise of this 
old believer, and with Christ in their arms, find earth bereft of its 
attractions and the grave of its terrors, and be ready at any mo- 
ment to “ shake hands with death, and smile that they are free.” 

“Oh, long to be installed in the throne 
Of endless glory : let thy spirit groan 


SIMEON. 


465 


After a long and plenary possession 
Of blessedness transcending all expression. 
Sing Simeon’s swan-like song at his decease — 
‘ Lord, let thy servant now depart in peace.’ ” 


WAITING FOR THE CONSOLATION. 

Waiting, 

Just as devout and hoary Simeon stood, stand we, 

Jus| as old Anna, numbering each night and day, 

The consolation of God’s Israel to see. 

Wishing, 

Not now the Father’s grace to one lorn nation here; 

Not now the Son as Priest, our guilt and grief to bear, 

And to be crowned with thorns and pierced by Gentile speij*. 

Watching 

For that new consolation which shall win the lost, 

Those heavenly gifts, long promised, of the Holy Ghost. 

That latter, greater than the primal, Pentecost. 

Wondering, 

That He who holds those winds of heaven in his list 
Should stay their blowing to revive us as they list; 

From watering his garden should avert the mist. 

Wailing 

The adulterous love of many to the world — 

Its riches, friendships, pleasures; and the Sovereign hurled 
From his high throne, his glorious banner fouled and furled. 

Waiting, 

In faith and patience, as did Simeon of erst; 

In fasts and prayer, as Anna; till the dawn shall burst 
Of that great consolation round the earth long curst — 

Waiting 

The consolation that shall turn to bread earth’s stones, 

The consolation that shall hush creation’s groans, 

That shall make manifest and glorious God’s sons. 

30 



XXXVIII. 

JOHN THE BAPTIST. 

ERE the question to be addressed to a number of per- 
sons in succession, “What are the qualities necessary 
to constitute human greatness, and which would justify 
us in applying to the individuals in whom they are 
found the epithet of ‘ great men’?” we should certainly be sur- 
prised at the variety of the answers, and at the frequency and 
perversity with which the epithet was misapplied. With persons 
of the more earthly and vulgar sort, we should be mortified to 
discover that elevation in social rank, or vast accumulations of 
wealth, or nobility of descent, or the simple possession of power, 
in whatever manner acquired or employed, constituted, in their 
judgment, the chief elements of human greatness. 

With a much greater number, perhaps, in these times, the 
possession of high intellectual gifts realizes their highest concep- 
tion of a great man, even should those gifts be used by him 
simply for his own selfish ends, or perverted to the injury of his 
species, and intellect without God is almost deified and adored, 
according to the modern fashion of hero-worship. Talent re- 
ceives far more homage from thousands than the highest and 
purest forms of virtue, and genius is pleaded as more than half 
an apology and compensation for its debasement to the worst 
ends and its association with the most malignant passions or the 
foulest vices. There is a glory and a splendor to the eyes of 
such men in the mere manifestations of power that dazzles their 

466 



\ 












JOHN THE BAPTIST 


467 


minds and confounds all their moral distinctions, even when that 
power is put forth, like the blind strength of Samson, to shake 
the pillars of the social edifice. 

It is well for us, in the midst of these crude and injurious 
notions, to come to the Bible for the rectification and the guidance 
of our moral judgments, and to learn from it w'hat, in the esti- 
mate of angels and of God himself, constitutes true human great- 
ness. And an example suitable to our purpose rises up before us 
in the character of John the Baptist, of whom it was announced 
by an angel to his father before he was born, that he should be 
great, not in man’s account mainly, but in the judgment of the 
infinite mind — “great in the sight of the Lord.” Let us proceed 
to inquire what were those qualities in John which formed the 
element and secret of his greatness, and which afforded ground 
for this infallible, because divine, description of him. 

Now, it is remarkable that we do not find prominent in John 
the Baptist any one of those elements which commonly go to 
make up the world’s idea of greatness. He could not lay claim 
to high social status, or boast that 

“He derived his birth 

From loins enthroned, or great ones of the earth 
though neither was he mean in his origin, for he was the son of a 
devout priest, Zacharias by name, and of Elisabeth his wife. He 
was not born rich, nor did he ever rise to wealth ; but through- 
out his whole life his resources were as limited as his wants were 
few. His food was such as the wilderness in which he dwelt 
spontaneously afforded — locusts and wild honey ; and his raiment, 
in keeping with his scanty diet, was a garment of camel’s hair 
and a leathern girdle about his loins — not the purple and the 
silk which, as our Lord expresses it when speaking of John, were 
“ worn in kings’ palaces.” 

We do not trace in him any of that fine poetic genius which, 
apart from inspiration, was native to some of the earlier prophets, 
such as David and Isaiah. Nor was he trained in the learning 


468 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


of the Jews in any of the great schools or universities of his 
time, like Saul of Tarsus, afterward, at the feet of Gamaliel. 
For until he came forth in his public ministry at a ripe age, his 
life was spent among his native mountains of Judah — not, in- 
deed, in monastic seclusion, as some have strangely supposed, 
but in comparative retirement — in familiarity with Nature in all 
her moods of storm and calm, of gloom and sunshine, and in all 
her changeful aspects of Oriental beauty and sublimity ; and still 
more in the high converse of his soul with God, in the reading 
of his word and in prayer. With some modifications, we may 
apply to him the words of one of our older poets : 

“ The moss his bed, the cave his humble cell, 

His food the fruits, his drink the crystal well : 

Remote from man, with God he pass’d the days, 

Prayer all his business, all his pleasure praise.” 

It is even expressly intimated that “ John did no miracle.” And 
yet, in the face of all these facts, we find the heavenly messenger 
declaring to his father, before his birth, that he should be “ great 
in the sight of the Lord and our Lord saying of him, after his 
brief earthly ministry was ended, that of them that had been 
born of woman, there had not appeared a greater than John the 
Baptist. If, then, these common elements of a mere worldly 
greatness were wanting in John, where shall we discover those 
qualities and facts which warrant and sustain the singularly sig- 
nificant estimate given of him both by the angel and by the Lord 
of angels ? I have two answers to this question. 

I. The greatness of John the Baptist, in the sight of the Lord, 
consisted, to a great extent, in his distinguished moral excellences. 
This is evident from the delighted approval with which our Lord 
dwells upon these, as often as he speaks of this “ burning and 
shining light” to his disciples and to the people. And the prin- 
ciple which runs through all the moral teaching of the Bible, when- 
ever it touches on this subject, is, that man is great just in the 


JOHN THE BAPTIST. 


469 


degree in which he is Godlike, and that there is no real greatness 
in a human character, when weighed in the golden balances of 
heaven, where moral goodness is wanting. 

When the disciples on one memorable occasion sought to 
attract the notice of their Master to the material temple at Jeru- 
salem, with its goodly stones, its rich ornaments^ its vast propor- 
tions and its magnificent architecture, his answer was, “ Is this 
what you are looking at?” and immediately he turned their 
attention to something far more interesting — the magnanimous 
act of self-denial of the poor widow as she was casting her two 
mites, which were all her living, into the temple treasury. The 
man of high intellectual gifts without holiness is only regarded 
by the unfallen angels as on this account the more vast and 
mournful a ruin. It is not unlikely that Satan is the most 
powerful of all created minds in the universe, and therefore the 
man who is content to admire unsanctified intellect would only 
be consistent in reserving his chief admiration for that prince of 
devils who said to evil, “ Be thou my good.” There is no reason 
to question that John was a man of remarkable native force of 
intellect; but whenever Jesus dilates with complacency on his 
forerunner, it is not of this that he once speaks as forming the 
element of his greatness, but of the rare grandeur and beauty of 
his character as a man of God. 

Nor must the fact be overlooked that John’s position and work 
were such as to test his moral integrity and strength to the 
utmost, and to “ prove him as by fire.” There are men whose 
virtues are of that easy kind which are in a good degree to be 
accounted for by the mere absence of temptation; the hidden 
sediment of corruption that is within them is never brought to 
the surface. But John was exposed to a succession of ordeals of 
such severity that everything must have perished before it but 
what was genuine and divine. His special mission was to an- 
nounce to the Jews the near approach of their Messiah, to bring 
them into a state of moral preparation for his reception, and to 


470 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


identify and mark him out to the people after he had come. 
From the beginning he appears to have formed the most correct 
and definite conceptions of the work which was thus given him 
to do. It must be evident, however, that both the work itself 
and the state of Jewish society at the period required for its dis- 
charge a rare combination of the highest forms of moral excel- 
lence. But John showed himself to possess these ; and as oppo- 
sition and adversity gathered and deepened around him, the 
moral grandeur of his character shone out the more brightly, 
like the stars at midnight, until the unerring Judge could de- 
clare of him with loving testimony, after his brief but effective 
ministry was ended, “ John fulfilled his course.” Thus was he 
“ great in the sight of the Lord.” To bring out this more 
vividly, it is necessary that w T e enter a little into detail. 

1. It must be evident that the state of society among the Jews 
when John appeared was such as that he needed for his work an 
extraordinary measure of moral intrepidity. He found them 
divided into two great and powerful religious parties : on the 
one hand the Pharisees, who were formal without being devout; 
punctilious about trifles, but disregardful of the weightier matters 
of the law; impatient of opposition, and malignantly resentful 
against every one that questioned their authority; proud of their 
descent from Abraham, as constituting them a sort of peerage of 
the human race, and confiding in it as their sure passport to 
heaven : and on the other hand the Sadducees, w T ho were the 
rationalists of their times ; skeptical not from their love of truth, 
but from indifference to it; affecting a proud intellectualism in 
their conversation, but self-indulgent and sensual in their lives. 
It evidently required one from whose breast the fear of God had 
driven out every other fear to step forth from his wilderness a 
solitary witness for God, and confront these dominant sectaries 
and their leaders, and, unbacked by popular support or influence 
of any kind, without apology or compromise, in plain, unvarnished 
words to tell them of their danger, their duties and their sins. 


JOHN THE BAPTIST. 


471 


But the brave preacher was equal to his task. Hear how he 
seeks to awaken the Pharisee from his self-satisfied dream by ad- 
dressing him in these words of unwonted fidelity : “ Think not 
to say within yourselves that we have Abraham for our father, 
for I say unto you that God is able of these stones to raise up 
children unto Abraham.” Mark how he flashes in upon the 
unwilling conscience of the Sadducee thoughts of the retributions 
of an immortal world, and warns him “to flee from the wrath to 
come.” And when he passes up from the banks of the Jordan 
to the court of the Galilean tetrarch, royal crime finds no shelter 
from .the shafts of his stern rebuke. The frowns of Herod can- 
not terrify him, or his caresses and flatteries make him “ prophesy 
smooth things,” or turn aside for a moment the bolt which he 
has made ready for the incestuous ruler : “ It is not lawful for 
thee to have thy brother’s wife.” 

Nor is he less faithful and fearless when addressing the vast 
multitudes of the common people as they come streaming from 
all quarters of the land to the banks of the Jordan to his bap- 
tism. Our Lord himself specially notices the fact that he was 
no supple and pliant moralist, accommodating himself to the 
popular prejudices, and trimming his sails to catch the current 
of human applause with the view of turning it to base and selfish 
ends. He was no “reed shaken with the wind.” But, aware 
of the corrupt and worldly motives that had borne the greater 
number of them into his presence, he denounced them as a brood 
of serpents, “ a generation of vipers,” and called them to choose 
between immediate repentance and early and awful retribution : 
“ And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees : there- 
fore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, 
and cast into the fire.” As soon might you have moved the 
sun in the heavens from his course as have turned from his 
duty this stern reformer, standing in God’s name with the 
winnowing fan of his ministry of repentance. Such moral in- 
trepidity, as “among innumerable incorrupt he stood,” was a 


472 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


“ spectacle for angels,” and made him " great in the sight of 
the Lord.” 

2. Self-renouncing humility was another distinguishing excel- 
lence of the character of John. At the moment when his popu- 
larity was at its flood-tide, and when he needed only to give the 
smallest whisper of encouragement in order to bring the highest 
honors to his feet, Christ appeared ; and now it became his duty, 
instead of continuing to gather disciples to himself, to point and 
lead them to the Saviour, and as soon as possible to disappear 
and be forgotten amid the blaze of his surpassing glory. But it 
required no common degree of virtue in John’s heart to do this 
willingly and without a grudge. There is a fascination in power 
and influence when once possessed ; and hence we see men so 
often lingering on the stage of public life when they should 
have quitted it, and loth to abandon a sphere which they are no 
longer qualified to fill. Even men of unquestioned religious 
worth have found it difficult to renounce position and power 
and to consent without a murmur that others should occupy the 
place which they had once held. 

Think of what was now required of John. To-day he was 
filling all eyes, to-morrow he was to be nothing. John’s own 
disciples, though sincerely good men, were not all at once equal 
to this high duty. AVe can trace the workings of rivalry and 
envy in those words which really convey a complaint in the form 
of information : “Rabbi, he that was with thee beyond Jordan, 
baptizeth, and all men come to him.” They grudged to see 
another occupying the place in men’s attention which he had so 
lately occupied, and which had shed down a certain amount of 
reflected honor upon themselves, and they strove to awaken the 
same jealous feelings in his magnanimous breast. 

But the soul of this true moral hero dwelt and moved in a 
pure and elevated region to which such foul mists as these seldom 
or never ascend. Instead of expressing any sympathy with their 
complaint, their words drew from him a noble response, which 


JOHN THE BAPTIST. 


*i73 


not only showed how clearly he apprehended the relation in 
which he stood officially to the Messiah, and how cordially he 
rejoiced in his extending honors, but that he even saw the very 
ends of his mission and ministry accomplished in those triumphs, 
and instead of depreciating or grudging them as his disciples did, 
gratefully hailed them as his highest possible reward. As if he 
had said, “ My work is crowned when I see the tide of popular 
interest flowing to his feet. For this end came I into the world. 
I am only a voice sent to prepare the way of the Lord. I am 
not the bridegroom, but the bridegroom’s friend. He that hath 
the bride is the bridegroom ; but the friend of the bridegroom 
rejoiceth greatly because of the bridegroom’s voice. This my 
joy therefore is fulfilled. He must increase, but I must de- 
crease.” 

3. We notice, as a third distinguishing characteristic of John, 
his faith in God in the midst of dark providences. His fidelity 
in reproving the criminality of Herod and in calling his adulterous 
life by its right name having awakened the implacable resent- 
ment of Herodias, the tetrarch’s associate in sin, had occasioned 
his being cast into prison, with the likelihood of his being put 
-at any moment to a violent death. His disciples cling to him 
in his adversity, and occasionally communicate with him in his 
confinement, and among other intelligence which they bear to 
him from the world without inform him of the great miracles 
which Jesus is performing, and of the multitudes which are 
flocking eagerly around him to hear his words. But this intelli- 
gence appears to have been coupled with expressions of doubt on 
the part of John’s disciples as to whether this new teacher that 
had arisen could be the Messiah or not. Perhaps they thought 
with themselves that, if he were indeed the Christ whose advent 
their master had so joyfully announced, and for whose fit recep- 
tion he had so earnestly labored to prepare the minds of the 
people, he would certainly have interposed, in some form or 
other, to set their master at liberty. 


474 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


Every one knows that evil surmisings and suspicions, which 
would never have arisen spontaneously in the mind of a good 
man like John, yet, when injected into his mind by others, may 
rankle and fester there like an arrow tipped with poison. Be- 
sides, who is a stranger to the influence of outward circumstances 
over his thoughts, casting shadow or sunshine over them ? It is 
easy, therefore, to conceive that the darkness and solitude of 
those dungeon walls, on the margin of the Dead Sea, might at 
length have helped to awaken in the Baptist’s mind gloomy 
thoughts of divine Providence, and to make him wonder why 
more direct and open sympathy was not shown to him by Jesus. 
It may even be conjectured that, having come, as he knew, “ in 
the spirit and power of Elias,” he had expected that his end 
would also more nearly resemble his, and that if not translated 
to heaven in a chariot of fire, without tasting of death, he would 
not, at all events, be permitted to close his life amid the ignominy 
of a prison and by the executioner’s sword. 

These are thoughts and feelings which we can imagine to 
have been suggested to the mind of John in his dungeon soli- 
tude, not only by flesh and blood, but even by weak faith, and 
which, if they had been encouraged and indulged by him, 
would have stood in too close connection with rebellious mur- 
murings and hard thoughts of God. But no such unworthy 
sentiments appear to have even once disturbed the calm trust 
of this afflicted confessor ; not one complaint or querulous ques- 
tioning is echoed by those damp dungeon walls. Great in service, 
he becomes even greater in endurance, though subjected through 
long weeks to protracted waiting and suffering, which have 
often worn out the patience even of eminent saints of God, 
and which are far more hard to bear than one sharp but brief 
affliction. 

It has indeed been imagined by some that the message which 
he sent to Jesus by certain of his disciples from his prison — “Art 
thou he that should come, or do we look for another?” — was 


JOHN THE BAPTIST. 


475 


meant to express his own rising doubts in reference to the fact 
of our Lord’s Messiahship. But it was far more probably in- 
tended to resolve the doubts of his disciples, by making them 
the actual eye-witnesses of the Saviour’s wonderful works, and to 
bring them into more loving and intimate connection with him. 
His faith rode triumphant through all that trying season, until it 
changed into sight amid the bright visions of the immortal world. 
Unjustly imprisoned — imprisoned for his very fidelity to God and 
virtue — his light hidden in the very noontide of his usefulness — 
allowed to remain in prison and to linger out his days in inaction 
there, with no message to explain or outward event to mitigate 
the providence — he calmly waited the explanations of the hea- 
venly world, and when all was dark around him, said in his 
heart, “ Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.” Thus was 
he “ great in the sight of the Lord.” 

II. But when we have thus ascribed some of the highest forms 
of moral excellence to the Baptist, we have not exhausted the 
meaning of that angelic prediction of him which we have been 
endeavoring to illustrate. His greatness in part arose also out 
of that official relation in which he was to stand to Christ as the 
Saviour of the world. This relation was to be singular and glo- 
rious — such, in some respects, as no other being had occupied or 
could afterward occupy. For, as the angel expresses it in making 
the announcement, he was “ to go before the Messiah,” and “ to 
make ready a people to welcome him and when at length the 
Saviour emerged from the obscurity of his private life into the 
full blaze of his public ministry, he was to point him out to the 
notice and the faith of men, and to say, u This is he of whom I 
spake.” 

And not only in the manner in which he did this, but in the 
very fact itself that he was called to the discharge of so unique 
and high an office, he was “ great in the sight of the Lord.” It 
is on this account mainly — if I do not greatly mistake — that we 


476 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


find Jesus declaring of John that he was “ not only a prophet, 
but more than a prophet/’ and even announcing, in the most 
unqualified terms, that at the period of his birth there had not 
a greater been born of woman than John the Baptist. 

The prophets that had preceded him for four thousand years 
had merely foretold the Messiah as coming some time in the 
remote future, and even these predictions had usually been 
shrouded in types, or in language more or less dimly figurative. 
It was the peculiar honor and privilege of John that he could 
not only point forward to the Messiah as coming, and as even 
at the door, but that he should be the first of all human beings 
to identify and point him out as come. The culminating moment 
in his ministry was when he could stretch out his hand to Jesus 
of Nazareth and say, with divinely-inspired certainty, “ Behold 
the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world ! ” 
There is the great personage for whom the world has been wait- 
ing for innumerable ages — “the desire of all nations” — to whom 
type and oblation and prophecy have been pointing from the 
beginning of time — for whose advent all the past has uncon- 
sciously travailed as it were in birth — God’s Lamb, who is to do 
in reality what the sacrifices of bulls and goats and lambs have 
only done typically — to bear, and by bearing to bear away, the 
sin of the world. 

Now, to stand nearest to this illustrious Deliverer and Re- 
deemer — to be the first of all the human race to recognize him 
and lead men to him — was an honor which Abraham and Moses 
and Isaiah and Elijah and Daniel would have coveted, and 
which they would willingly have exchanged all their own 
peculiar honors to possess, and in the possession of which 
John was raised above all other prophets — above all others 
that had been born of women. And in these facts the 
words of the angel were illustrated and vindicated to the full, 
which foretold that he should be “great in the sight of the 
Lord.” 


JOHN THE BAPTIST. 


477 


There are certain conclusions of great moment which arise out 
of this course of illustrative remark. One of these has respect to 
the dignity of Christ and to the importance of the work which 
he specially came into the world to accomplish. If John derived 
such singular honor from merely being the herald and harbinger 
of Christ — if to have been permitted to stand nearest to him in 
the grand procession of typical personages and prophets that 
had heralded his coming down through all the past centuries, 
and to have been the first to identify and proclaim him when 
he appeared, was enough to constitute him the greatest of those 
who had been born of women — then how great must Christ him- 
self be ! When we look on the long procession of kings and 
prophets that had been moving before him in stately majesty 
for so many thousands of years, we expect that the Being whom 
they shall at length introduce shall be immeasurably greater in 
dignity than any of them — that, in the highest sense, he shall be 
the Son of God. There would have been an inconceivable in- 
congruity in the fact of so many prophets only leading in a 
prophet. 

And surely the special work of such a personage so announced 
and introduced must be something unspeakably greater than a 
mere prophet’s work, else why should not a mere prophet have 
been commissioned to accomplish it? We irresistibly conclude 
that, when such a personage came into the world, it was on an 
extraordinary mission corresponding to his dignity and pow r er. 
And thus the belief of our Lord’s divinity leads us by a strong 
presumption to the belief of his atonement, and both doctrines 
are seen to be necessary in order to harmonize the facts and state- 
ments of Scripture one with another. 

And should it not be our habitual and earnest aim to have 
our dispositions and our lives brought into conformity with the 
principle we have been illustrating? Let us seek to become 
greatly good that we may become truly great. In the training 
and educating of our children, while we diligently and dutifully 


478 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


exert ourselves to store their minds with useful knowledge, and 
to strengthen and discipline their mental powers, let us place 
far above this the educating of their hearts — the leading of them, 
with divine help, to be pure and truthful and benignant and de- 
vout and Christ-like — not so much to find them clever children 
as to make them good and Godlike men. There was not only a 
beautiful amiability, but a scriptural ly-enlightened appreciation 
of the highest form of excellence, in the saying of the late Dr. 
Arnold, in regard to one of his pupils who was somewhat dull 
and slow of intellect, but who dutifully did his best wdth the 
powers that God had given him, that he felt such sincere respect 
and even reverence for the boy that he could have taken off his 
hat before him when he met him. 

But surely we may say to those who are satisfying themselves 
with aiming at some of the forms of a merely human greatness, 
“ Where will ye leave your glory ?” You cannot carry one of 
these things with you into the great world which is the goal of 
your earthly existence ; they shrivel into nothing, like the dead 
leaves of autumn, when the winter of death approaches, and even 
intellectual gifts will only be of any value to you in eternity 
according as you have faithfully used them for God here. Oh, 
aim, then, supremely at that moral excellence which transcends 
every other kind of greatness as heaven is above the earth; 
for “ greater is he that ruleth his own spirit, than he that taketh. 
a city.” 

On one occasion, when the nobility of France were assembled 
to listen to the funeral sermon of the greatest of French mon- 
archs, the preacher solemnly exclaimed, in presence of the in- 
animate body of him who, a few months before, had made the 
nations tremble, “Brethren, God alone is great,” and then 
paused. And the preacher’s words were true. God alone is 
great, and all the true greatness that can belong to any of his 
creatures must arise from their possession of Godlike qualities. 
Cultivate, then, like the holy Baptist, a spirit of moral in- 


JOHN THE BAPTIST. 


479 


trepidity, of self-renouncing humility, of filial trust in God. 
Learn to conciliate an enemy, and to 

“ Subdue your pride 

To the forgetting of a wrong that whets 
The sword to think on.” 

Lead men to the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the 
world, and then, like John, you shall be truly great, for you shall 
be “ great in the sight of the Lord.” 




XXXIX. 

P E T E E. 

MONGST the mountains of Galilee, amidst the recol- 
lections of those heroic tribes who had once “jeopardied 
their lives unto the death ” against the host of Jabin, 
under the very shadow of those ancient hills which had 
once echoed the triumphant strains of Deborah and of Barak, was 
nursed that burning zeal, that unbroken patriotism, which made 
the name of Galilean so formidable even to the legions of the 
empire. There, far removed from the mingled despotism and 
corruption of the schools and courts of Jerusalem, out of the 
country from which the chief priests and scribes were proudly 
convinced that no prophet coukl arise, we might fairly look for 
the freer and purer development, of those older yearnings after 
the future, of that undying trust in the invisible, which had 
once characterized the Jewish race — for an ardent hope of the 
promised deliverance, yet not hardened into formalism by the 
traditions of the Pharisee — for a soaring aspiration after divinity 
not yet chained to earth by the unbelief of the Sadducees. 

Such were all the Galilean apostles — such especially was Simon, 
surnamed the Rock. No priest of the house of Levi, no warrior 
of the host of Judah, ever burnt with more fervent zeal in behalf 
of God's chosen people; no prophet ever waited in more rapt 
expectation for the hope of the coming Deliverer, as it dawned 
upon him through the earthly images which bounded his imme- 

480 


















PETER. 


481 


diate view in Babylon or Edom or Jerusalem, than did the 
fisherman of Galilee as he hung upon the words and looks of 
that unknown Teacher who appeared on the shores of his native 
lake. Gradually, dimly, doubtfully, the vision rose within his 
mind ; sometimes an awful consciousness of some divine presence, 
which, like Gideon or Manoali, he “ prayed to depart from him 
sometimes of an earthly empire, in which they who had “ left all 
and followed him” should reign as satraps of the King of Zion ; 
sometimes of the blaze of glory which rested on the ancient 
tabernacle, as when he woke upon the holy mount and spake 
“ not knowing what he said.” But, amidst all these dark and 
wavering images, his face was set in the right direction, and 
therefore, in that memorable scene of which every detail of place 
and circumstance is described to us with unusual precision, when 
at Caesarea Philippi, far withdrawn from the gaze of the multi- 
tude beneath the snowy heights of Hermon, the question was 
solemnly put — “ But whom say ye that I am ?” — the heavenly 
truth flashed upon him, and his whole being expressed himself 
in the words which did indeed contain the meeting point between 
the two dispensations : “ Thou art the Christ, the Son of the 
living God ;” the anointed Messiah, whom prophets and kings 
have desired to see; the Son of Him who once again, as at the 
burning bush, had come with ever-living power to visit and re- 
deem his people. Well might the solemn blessing which follows 
announce to us, as with a trumpet’s voice, that this was at once 
the crisis of Peter’s life and of the Christian faith : “ Thou hast 
told me what I am, and I will tell thee what thou art.” In that 
confession were wrapt up the truths which were to be the light 
of the future ages of Christendom ; on him who had uttered it 
devolved at once the awful privilege of passing from the Jew 
into the Christian, from the prophet to the apostle, from Simon 
the son of Jona into Peter the rock. 

Gradually, too, and doubtfully, and with many a wild and 
wayward impulse, did the enthusiasm of Peter kindle not merely 
31 


482 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


into admiration for the divine Teacher, but love for the divine 
Friend. That central fire which was the life of the whole career 
of every one of the apostles, so far as they were apostles at all, 
in him existed, not more deeply and truly, it may be, but more 
visibly, as the one absorbing element into which his natural en- 
thusiasm resolved itself. Amidst all the impetuous sallies of 
zeal — amidst all the weaknesses consequent on his presumption 
and vehemence — whether when he drew the sword in the garden, 
or gave way to the panic of the moment in the house of Caiaphas 
— this was still the sustaining, purifying, restoring principle: 
“He needed not save to wash his feet, and was clean every 
whit,” 

Whatever else might be the feelings with which he looked 
upon our Lord — with whatever grounds the early Church may 
have traced to his hand the representation of the Prophet and 
Lawgiver which is preserved to us in the Gospel of St. Matthew 
— it may have been a true feeling which ascribed to his more 
personal and direct teaching that second Gospel which, though in 
substance the same, is yet so remarkably contrasted with it in 
the minuteness and liveliness with which it records the outward 
actions, the look and manner, the very Syriac words which fell 
from Him who there appears not merely as the Fulfiller of the 
ancient covenant, but in the closer and more personal relation of 
the human Protector and Friend — a Friend not only in bound- 
less power and goodness, but in all human sympathy and tender- 
ness. “ He loved St, John exceedingly,” says Chrysostom ; “ but 
it was by Peter that he was exceedingly beloved.” 

And now let us carry our thoughts a few years forward and 
place ourselves in that early period of the Christian Church of 
which our only historical record is to be found in the first twelve 
chapters of the Acts. It is indeed a scene only known to us 
dimly and partially; the chronology, the details of life, the cha- 
racters and fortunes of the several apostles, are wrapt in almost 
impenetrable darkness. One colossal figure, however, emerges 


PETER. 


483 


from the gloom, now more than ever the representative of his 
brethren, though from twelve they have grown to many thou- 
sands — though from the little flock of the first apostles they have 
grown into a vast society, striking its roots far and wide wherever 
the Jewish race extends. Can we doubt that this was the time 
when those promises to Peter recurred to the minds of the dis- 
ciples with all the force of prophecies which had received their 
full accomplishment? Can we doubt that when they saw him 
stand forth in the front of the whole body of the believers, in 
their first days of bereavement, for the election of a new apostle, 
in their first hour of exultation on the day of Pentecost, in the 
first brunt of persecution from the Jewish Sanhedrim, Peter was 
to them indeed the rock and shepherd of the Church ? Can we 
doubt that when they witnessed the thousands upon thousands 
of his converts, they felt that it was the rolling back of the ever- 
lasting doors by him who had the keys of the kingdom of heaven ? 
— that when the magic arts of Simon quailed before him, when 
the four quaternions of Herod’s soldiers were unable to detain 
him in the guarded fortress, they felt that the embattled powers 
of evil were driven back before that power against which the 
gates of hell should not prevail ? Can we doubt that when they 
saw the crowds rushing into the city and laying their sick along 
the streets if so be that the shadow of Peter passing by might 
overshadow some of them — the awful judgment upon falsehood 
in the death of Ananias — the divine sanction of beneficence in 
the resurrection of Dorcas — they felt that what Peter had bound 
on earth was indeed bound in heaven, that what Peter had loosed 
on earth was indeed loosed in heaven ? But as before, so now, 
there was yet a higher mission to discharge than to stand at 
the head of his brethren. He had been the first to recognize the 
manifestation of the Son, he was now to be the first to receive the 
manifestation of the Spirit. It is true that as before he had been 
the fervent Galilean, so now he was the apostle of the circum- 
cision. Still, in those appeals which swayed the hearts of thou- 


484 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


sands in the streets of Jerusalem, he takes his stand on David's 
tomb — he welcomes the newest and latest of God’s dispensations 
in the language of the oldest of the prophets. Still, he and his 
brother apostles are to be found entering the Beautiful Gate of the 
temple to join in its sacred services; still, at the close of day, they 
may be seen lingering on its eastern height in that ancient cloister 
which bore the name of Solomon. The worship of the temple 
and the synagogue still went on side by side with the prayers and 
the breaking of bread from house to house; the Jewish family 
life was the highest expression of Christian unity, whether in the 
household of the great apostle himself, when Abraham and Sarah 
were still the types of Christian marriage, or in that sacred circle 
of the brethren of our Lord, in whom, with their wives and chil- 
dren, the apostolic age may have loved to trace the continued 
sanction of those domestic relations by which they were bound to 
our Lord himself. The fulfillment of the ancient law was the 
aspect of Christianity to which the attention of the Church was 
most directed, whether as set forth in the divine code of Chris- 
tian duty contained in the earliest and most purely Jewish of the 
Gospels — that according to St. Matthew — or in the earliest and 
most purely Jewish of the Epistles — the Epistle of James the 
Just, now beginning to take his place in the divine economy as 
the type of all that strictly belonged to the primitive, original 
Israelite Christian. 

But was Christianity to be no more than a perfected Judaism ? 
Was Peter to be no more than the founder of the Jerusalem 
Church ? Was this to be the final end of those lofty aspirations 
of the ancient prophets — the adequate fulfillment of those parting 
words of his ascended Lord? Was the existing framework of 
the Christian society, which, however widely ramified, was still 
confined to the Hebrew race and those Hebrew institutions that 
bore on their very front the marks of approaching dissolution — 
was this the Church against which the gates of death were never 
to prevail? Were all those generations of the ancient world who 


PETER. 


485 


had lived before the law — all those countless hundreds of Gentile 
proselytes who even now were knocking for admittance at the 
gates of life — were all these, with all the heathen nations at their 
rear, to be for ever excluded from the kingdom of heaven? Such 
were the questionings which must have arisen in the mind of the 
great apostle when, on the roof at Jaffa, overlooking the waves 
of the western sea — the sea of Greece and Rome — the sea of the 
isles of the Gentiles — he knelt in trance and prayer waiting for 
the answer to his thoughts. No ; it could not be. No ; although 
he himself shall pass away before a new apostle, greater even 
than himself — though the first shall be last and the last first— ^ 
though he has borne the scorching blast of the rising sun, and 
the other has been called but at the eleventh hour, — though all 
this takes place, it must not be. What God hath cleansed, that 
Peter must not call common or unclean ; already the messengers 
of the Roman centurion are in the court below ; once more he is 
to wield the keys of life and death — once more to loose the Chris- 
tian Church for ever from that yoke which neither he nor his 
fathers had been able to bear — once more, wider far than ever 
mortal hand had up to that moment dared, to throw open the 
gates of heaven even to the whole human race; and then his 
work — his own especial work, as the first apostle and the founder 
of the Church — was ended. 

Without Peter, humanly speaking, the infant Church must 
have perished in its cradle; he it was who, under God’s blessing, 
caught the truth which was to be the polar star of its future his- 
tory — who guided it safely through the dangers of its first exists 
ence — who then, when the time came for launching it into a 
wider ocean, preserved it no less by his retirement from the helm 
which was destined for another hand. He was the rock, not the 
builder, of the Christian society — the guardian of its gates, not 
the master of its innermost recesses — the founder, not the propa- 
gator nor the finisher — the Moses of its exodus, not the David 
of its triumph nor the Daniel of its latter days. 


486 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


And with him, by the very force of the terms, the purely per- 
sonal and historical part of our Lord’s promise of necessity came 
to an end. Never again can Jewish zeal and Jewish forms so 
come into contact with the first beginnings of Christian faith — 
never again can mortal man find himself so standing on the 
junction of two dispensations; the Church once founded can 
have no second rock ; the gates once opened can never again be 
closed ; the sins which were then condemned, the virtues which 
were then blessed, the liberty which was then allowed, the license 
which was then forbidden, whether by word or deed of the first 
apostle, were once for all bound or loosed in the courts of heaven, 
never again to be unbound or bound by any earthly power 
whatever. 

But there is a sense, and that of great practical importance, in 
which the example of Peter, like that of the other apostles, lives 
and will live always. We know the feeling of suspicion, of con- 
tempt, of compassion with which the world regards those laborers 
in a good cause who, whether in praise or blame, are called 
enthusiasts. We know how often this feeling is provoked or 
even deserved by the imperfections, the narrowness, the one- 
sided views with which such characters are often marked, and 
how strong is the temptation to regard them, if not as absolutely 
mischievous, at least as useless or despicable. It is as a warning 
against such a feeling as this that the blessing on Peter becomes 
the expression of a universal law of the providence of God. 
Most signally indeed was it shown in the character of the first 
apostle that it was by no intellectual greatness or strength of 
mind that Christianity was first communicated to man. Most 
remarkable is the proof afforded of the divine origin of our faith, 
when we contemplate the fact that he who was undoubtedly its 
first human founder cannot, by the wildest license of conjecture, 
be imagined capable of conceiving or inventing it. Grant that 
Peter was the chief of the first apostles, and it follows almost of 
necessity that the apostles were, as they professed to be, the dis- 


PETER. 


487 


ciples of no less than the Son of God. What is true, however, 
of Christianity in its first rise, is true also, in a measure, of all 
its subsequent exemplifications. Look at the history of any great 
movement for good in the world, and ask who took the first 
critical step in advance — who it was that the wavering and un- 
decided crowd chose to rally round as their leader and their 
champion — and will not the answer always be as it was in the 
apostolical age — not the man of wide and comprehensive thought 
nor of deep and fervent love, but the characters of simple, un- 
hesitating zeal wdiich act instead of reflecting, which venture 
instead of calculating, which cannot or will not see the diffi- 
culties with which the first struggle of an untried reformation is 
of necessity accompanied ? They may be doomed, like Peter, to 
retire before the advancing tread of a new apostle, but it is not 
till their task is finished ; they may perish, but their cause sur- 
vives ; they have been the pioneers in the great work which they 
themselves but faintly and partially understood. And of such, 
whether in nations or individuals, the well-known comment of 
Origen, echoed as it is with more or less distinctness by so many 
illustrious voices, from Tertullian down to Leo, is no exaggera- 
tion of the truth — “ He who has Peter’s faith is the Church’s 
rock ; he who has Peter’s virtues has Peter’s keys.” 




XL. 

JOHN. 

HE life of John, at first sight, seems shrouded in an 
atmosphere of religious awe which we cannot pene- 
trate ; in him the earthly seems so completely absorbed 
into the heavenly — the character, the thoughts, the 
language of the disciple so lost in that of the Master — that we 
tremble to draw aside the veil from that divine friendship ; we 
fear to mix any human motives with a life which seems so 
especially the work of the Spirit of God. 

It was not by fluctuating and irregular impulses like Peter, 
nor yet by a sudden and abrupt conversion like Paul, that John 
received his education for the apostleship ; there was no sphere 
of outward activity as in Peter, no vehement struggle as in Paul ; 
in action, while Peter speaks, moves, directs, he follows, silent 
and retired. It would almost seem as if in John the still con- 
templation, the intuitive insight into heavenly things, which 
form the basis of his character, had been deepened and solemnized 
by something of that more Eastern and primitive feeling to which 
the records of the Jewish nation lead us back — something of that 
more simple, universal, childlike spirit which brooded over the 
cradle of the human race — which entitled the Mesopotamian 
patriarch, rather than the Hebrew Lawgiver or the Jewish king, 
to be called “the friend of God” — which fitted the prophet of 
the Chaldean captivity, rather than the native seers of Samaria 
or Jerusalem, to be the “ man greatly beloved.” 

^he whole sum of John’s character must of necessity be con- 

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joiin. 


489 


tained in the one single fact that he was “the disciple whom 
Jesus loved.” Once understand that, from whatever causes, no 
obstacle intervened between him and that one divine object 
which, from the earliest dawn of youth to the last years of ex- 
treme old age, was ever impressing itself deeper and deeper into 
his inmost soul, and his whole work on earth is at once accounted 
for. Whatever we can conceive of devoted tenderness, of deep 
affection, of intense admiration for goodness, we must conceive 
of him who, even in the palace of the high priest and at the foot 
of the cross, was the inseparable companion of his Lord ; what- 
ever we can conceive of a gentleness and holiness ever increasing 
in depth and purity, that we must conceive of the heart and mind 
which produced the Gospel and the Epistles of St. John. 

One phase, however, of his character there was which might at 
first sight seem inconsistent with what has just been said, but 
which nevertheless was the aspect of it most familiar to the 
minds of the earliest Church. It was not as John the beloved 
disciple, but as John the son of thunder — not as the apostle who 
leaned on his Master’s breast at supper, but as the apostle who 
called down fire from heaven, who forbade the man to cast out 
devils, who claimed with his brother the highest places in the 
kingdom of heaven — that he was known to the readers of the 
first three Gospels. But, in fact, it is in accordance with what 
has been said that in such a character the more outward and 
superficial traits should have attracted attention before the com- 
plete perfection of that more inward and silent growth which 
was alone essential to it; and, alien in some respects as the bursts 
of fiery passion may be from the usual tenor of St. John’s later 
character, they fully agree with the severity, almost unparalleled 
in the New Testament, which marks the well-known anathema 
in his Second Epistle, and the story, which there seems no reason 
to doubt, of Cerinthus and the bath. It is not surprising that 
the deep stillness of such a character as this should, like the 
Oriental sky, break out from time to time into tempests of im- 


490 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


passioned vehemence ; still less that the character which was to 
excel all others in its devoted love of good should give indica- 
tions — in its earliest stages even in excess — of that intense hatred 
of evil without which love of good can hardly be said to exist. 

It was not till the removal of the first and the second apostle 
from the scene of their earthly labors that there burst upon the 
whole civilized world that awful train of calamities which, break- 
ing as it did on Italy, on Asia Minor and on Palestine almost 
simultaneously, though under the most different forms, was re- 
garded alike by Roman, Christian and Jew as the manifestation 
of the visible judgment of God. It was now — if we may trust 
the testimony alike of internal and external proof — in the in- 
terval between the death of Nero and the fall of Jerusalem, when 
the roll of apostolical epistles seemed to have been finally closed, 
when every other inspired tongue had been hushed in the grave, 
that there rose from the lonely rock of Patinos that solemn voice 
which mingled with the storm that raged around it as the dirge 
of an expiring world; that under the “red and lowering sky” 
which had at last made itself understood to the sense of the 
dullest, there rose that awful vision of coming destiny which has 
received the expressive name of the Revelation of St. John the 
Divine. 

As it is love that pervades our whole conception of the teach- 
ing of St. John, so also it pervades our whole conception of his 
character. We see him — it surely is no unwarranted fancy — we 
see him declining with the declining century, every sense and 
faculty waxing feebler, but that one divinest faculty of all burn- 
ing more and more brightly ; we see it breathing through every 
look and gesture — the one animating principle of the atmosphere 
in which he lives and moves — earth and heaven, the past, the 
present and the future alike echoing to him the dying strain of 
his latest words: “We love him because he loved us.” And 
when at last he disappears from our view in the last pages of the 
sacred volume, ecclesiastical tradition still lingers in the close; 


/ 


JOHN. 


491 


and in that touching story, not the less impressive because so 
familiar to us, we see the aged apostle borne in the arms of his 
disciples into the Ephesian assembly, and there repeating over 
and over again the same saying, “ Little children, love one 
another,” till, when asked why he said this and nothing else, he 
replied, in those well-known words, fit indeed to be the farewell 
speech of the beloved disciple : “ Because this is our Lord’s com- 
mand, and if you fulfill this, nothing else is needed.” 

Such was the life of St. John — the sunset, as I venture to call 
it, of the apostolical age — not amidst the storms which lowered 
around the apocalyptic seer, but the exact image of those milder 
lights and shades which we know so well even in our own native 
mountains, every object far and near brought out in its due pro- 
portions, the harsher features now softly veiled in the descending 
shadows, and the distant heights lit up with a far more than 
morning or mid-day glory in the expiring glow of the evening 
heavens. 




XLI. 

JAMES. 

HE character of James is only to be read in his Epistle, 
for all traditionary notices of his history and habits 
seem uncertain. We know little of him, except that 
he was not the James who stood with Jesus on the 
mount; that he was known as James the Less; and that many 
identify him with James the Lord’s brother, of whom Paul 
speaks. At the council of Jerusalem he acted, in some measure, 
as moderator, and his letter as well as his speech shows him to 
have possessed qualities admirably adapting him for this office 
— wisdom, calmness, common sense, avoidance of extremes, a 
balanced intellect and a determined will. 

The Epistle of James is the first and best homily extant. It 
is not what many would now call a “ gospel sermon,” but neither 
is the Sermon on the Mount. It has little doctrinal statement 
and no consecutive argument; it is a list of moral duties, in- 
spirited by the earnestness with which they are urged, and 
beautified by the graphic and striking imagery in which the style 
is clothed. James is one of the most sententious, pointed and 
terse of the New Testament authors. He reads like a modern. 
The edges of his sentences sparkle. His words are as “ goads, 
and as nails.” He reminds us more of Ecclesiastes than of any 
other Scripture book. Paul’s short sentences never occur till the 
close of his Epistles, and remind us then of hurried pantings of 
the heart; they are like the postscripts of lovers. James’ entire 

492 



JAMES. 


493 


Epistle is composed of brief, glancing sentences, discovering the 
extreme liveliness and piercing directness of his intellect. Every 
word tells. How sharp and effective are such expressions as— 
“ When lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin ; and sin, when 
it is finished, bringeth forth death.” “ Faith, if it hath not works, 
is dead, being alone.” “Show me thy faith without thy works, 
and I will show thee my faith by my works.” “ Thou believest 
that there is one God ; thou dost well ; the devils also believe, 
and tremble.” “ Is any among you afflicted ? Let him pray. 
Is any merry? Let him sing psalms” ! 

In one of those sentences — “ the devils believe, and tremble ” 
— as well as in his quaint and powerful picture of the tongue, we 
find that very rare and somewhat fearful gift of irony winding 
and darkening into invective. What cool scorn and warm horror 
meet in the words, “ believe , and tremble” ! How formidable 
does the “little member” he describes become when it is tipped 
with the “fire of hell”! And in what slow, successive, thun- 
derous words does he describe the “ wisdom which is not from 
above” as “earthly, sensual, devilish”! And upon the selfish 
rich he pours out a very torrent of burning gold, as if from the 
Lord of Sabaoth himself, into whose ears the cries of the reapers 
have entered. 

In fine, although we pronounce James rather an orator than 
a poet, yet there do occur some touches of genuine poetic beauty, 
of which, in pursuing his swift rhetorical way, he is himself 
hardly conscious. “ Let the rich,” he says, “ rejoice in that he 
is made low, because as the llower of the grass, he shall pass 
away.” For a moment he follows its brief history : “ The snn 
is no sooner risen with a burning heat, but it withereth the grass, 
and the flower thereof falleth, and the grace of the fashion of it 
perisheth : so also shall the rich man fade away in his ways ” — 
“fade away” and yet “rejoice,” inasmuch as, like the flower, 
whose bloom, savor and pith have floated up to swell the broad- 
blown lily of day, his adversity withers in the prosperity of God. 


494 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


“ What is life? It is even a vapor, that appeareth for a little 
time, and then vanisheth away.” These flowers, indeed, are 
transplanted from the prophetic forests. There, under the proud 
cedars, they were overshadowed and almost lost ; here they bloom 
alone, and are the more lovely that they seem to grow amid the 
fragments of the tables which Moses, in his ire, strewed along 
the sides of Sinai. 

A little common sense often goes a great way in a mystified 
and hollow world. How much mist does one sunbeam disperse ! 
James’ few sentences — the law in powder — thrown out with de- 
cision, pointed by keen satire and touched with terrific anger, 
have prevailed to destroy and disperse a thousand Antinomian 
delusions, and to redeem the “ perfect law of liberty ” from mani- 
fold charges of licentiousness. Even grant we that, among the 
unhallowed multitude who have sought to reduce the standard 
of morals, Luther, like another Aaron, may have mingled, even 
he must down before the “ man with a word and a blow,” the 
man Moses, impersonated by James, crying out — as his face’s 
indignant crimson flashes through the glory which the divine 
presence had left upon it, and his eye outbeams his face and out- 
runs his hurrying feet, and his arms make a heave-offering of the 
fire-written tables — “ Wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith 
without works is dead ?” 

Earnestness is a quality as old as the heart of man. Nor is 
the proclamation of it, as an essential and all-important element, 
merely of yesterday. It was preached — nay, cursed — into Is- 
rael’s ears by Deborah, when she spoke so bitterly of poor, 
trimming, tarrying, neutral Meroz, “ which came not forth to 
the help of the Lord.” It was asked, in thunder, from Carmel, 
by Elijah, as he said, “ How long halt ye between two opinions?” 
It was proclaimed, through a calm louder than the thunder, by 
the great Teacher himself, as he told the docile, well-behaved, 
money-loving weakling in the Gospel, and in him millions, 
“ Go, sell all that thou hast, and take up thy cross, and follow 


JAMES. 


495 


me.” And here, when faith in the cross itself was retiring to 
rest in the upper rooms of speculative acquiescence or traditionary 
acceptance, comes James stoutly resisting the retreat. His great 
demand is “ life, action, fruit.” Roughly, as one awakens those 
who are sleeping amid flames, does he shake the slumberers and 
alarm the supine. But let those who have been taught by more 
modern prophets the value of earnestness remember that James 
always admits the authority of that faith whence he would expect 
virtue to spring. “ Faith is dead, being alone ;” in other words, 
it is not the Christian faith at all. That is necessarily a living, 
fruit-bearing principle. And, strong as his hand is to tear away 
the subterfuges of the hypocrite, and bold as his spirit is to de- 
nounce every shade of inconsistency — every “sham” of that day 
— and although his tone against oppression and oppressors crashes 
up into that of the old prophets, and his fourth and fifth chapters 
are in the very mood of Malachi, yet the whole tenor of his doc- 
trine and spirit and language substantiates his first and only title 
— “ James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus. Christ .” 




XLIL 

STEPHEK 

MAN full of faith and of the Holy Ghost.” How few 
such men have there been in the world ! Even in the 
early days of the Christian Church, when the lamp 
of true religion burnt strong and bright, it was rare 
to meet with persons of this stamp. 

This, however, was Stephen’s character. He was naturally 
like other men. He was born in sin and shapen in iniquity — a 
corrupt and fallen creature like his brethren. But grace made 
him what he was. Grace renewed his heart and changed him 
into a true believer. He was “full of faith.” It is said of 
some Christians that “they believed.” We cannot even believe 
in Christ unless God takes away our natural unbelief and gives 
us faith. All true faith, even the feeblest, is his gift. It is by 
his grace alone that we see our need of a Saviour, and feel a 
desire to flee to him for salvation. But of Stephen it was written 
that he was “full of faith.” He made a large demand on God, 
and it was fully answered. He opened his mouth wide, and it 
was filled. His faith was strong and unwavering. He walked 
“as seeing Him who is invisible.” He “knew whom he be- 
lieved.” He lived a life of unclouded faith and hope. 

And why is it not so with us ? Why is our faith so weak ? 
Why are not our hearts full of Christ? Because we do not open 
them to him. We do not say unreservedly, “ Come, Lord, and 
dwell within me : take full possession of my heart.” We keep 

496 





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STEPHEN. 


497 


little sins there, and these thrust out the Saviour. We reserve a 
little corner for the world, and Jesus is not heartily welcomed. 
We are candidates for heaven, but we want to take the world 
with us there. Now, go and pray that God would empty your 
heart of all else, and fill you with faith. 

Pie was “ full of the Holy Ghost.” He did not merely look 
up to the Holy Spirit now and then as his Teacher, but the Holy 
Ghost was his daily and hourly Guide and Comforter. The 
Holy Ghost dwelt within him as an ever-present Friend. He 
walked in the Spirit all the day long. Here is the secret of a 
really heavenly life. Whether we are ministers or private Chris- 
tians, here is the secret of our Christian walk. And this need not 
merely be the portion of a few : it may be the portion of us all. 
For does not the apostle say, “ Refilled with the Spirit” ? If he 
dwells within us, then shall we rise higher and higher in our 
heavenward course. 

But let us examine a little into Stephen’s history. Let us see 
if the fruits of holiness appeared in his life. He was specially 
selected by the apostles as one of the seven deacons. These 
deacons were an order of men set apart as helpers to the apostles. 
Their office was to manage the money matters of thd Church, and 
also to assist the apostles in the work of their ministry, and for 
this purpose they were careful to choose men of a godly character 
and of blameless lives. No sooner was Stephen appointed to this 
important office than he began to labor zealously for Christ. We 
find him disputing with the Jews, earnestly endeavoring to bring 
his beloved countrymen over to the Christian faith. This was a 
hard task, for the Jews clung stubbornly to their old ways. The 
new doctrine of Christ crucified and salvation through him was 
altogether distasteful to them. But Stephen persevered. His 
was a work of faith and a labor of love, and he longed to bring 
them out of their darkness into a better and a purer light. And 
success in many cases crowned his efforts. 

But from this moment Stephen became a marked man — * 


498 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


marked by God as his faithful servant, marked by the apostles 
as a true brother and fellow-workman, and marked by the un- 
believing Jews as a troubler of Israel. And all the more furious 
did they become, since “ they were not able to resist the wisdom 
and the spirit with which he spake.” At length, after various 
attempts to put him down, they stirred up the people, seized 
him, dragged him before the council and brought against him 
false witnesses who accused him of having spoken blasphemy. 
Stephen was now in the power of his enemies, and what could 
he do against so violent a rabble? There was, however, some- 
thing so heavenly about his manner that his very judges were 
all struck by it, and as they looked upon him they felt as if 
they were looking upon the face of an angel. 

How remarkable is the power and influence of real godliness ! 
When you have been in the company of a holy person, have you 
not sometimes been quite awed, as it were, by it? Has it not 
humbled you and made you feel painfully conscious of your own 
unworthiness? Has it not shown you that religion is a real 
thing? Is there not something about an earnest servant of God 
which even the most careless person cannot but observe? How, 
then, will it be when Jesus himself stands before you in his 
glory? Will not many then exclaim, “ Depart from me, for I 
am a sinful man, O Lord”? 

Stephen makes a long defence before the council. For a while 
they listen to him. But when at length he upbraids them for 
resisting the Holy Ghost, and reminds them that they had mur- 
dered Him who came to save them, they could no longer restrain 
themselves. His words cut them to the heart, and they fairly 
gnashed their teeth with rage. Meanwhile, Stephen is unmoved. 
He is calm in the midst of the uproar; and being full of the 
Holy Ghost, he lifts his eyes upward to heaven, from whence 
came his strength and comfort. In a remarkable manner he 
received the support he so much needed. He is permitted to 
behold for a moment the very glory of God. He sees before 


STEPHEN. 


499 


him that almighty Saviour who lias promised to be with his 
people, and who is with us though we see him not, and with us 
more especially in the hour of our need. And now they rush 
upon him with the fury of so many wild beasts. They hurry 
him out of the city, for they dare not murder him in Jerusalem ; 
and having done this, they stone him to death. 

Such was the end of this faithful and fearless martyr. He 
was the first who suffered for Christ’s sake — the first who gave 
his life for the faith of the gospel. What an amazing contrast 
have we here between the peaceful calmness of Stephen and the 
headstrong fury of his murderers ! Think of those men, full of 
anger, giving way to their evil passions, altogether unchecked by 
the fear of God, breathing out threatenings and slaughter against 
their unoffending brother. Truly did the wise man say, “ Let 
a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man, rather than a fool in 
his folly.” May the Lord keep us from the madness of our own 
wicked hearts! May he restrain our passions and govern our 
wills ! Oh that he may never leave us to our own evil selves ! 

And now think of this Christian sufferer. How fearful his 
end, and yet how glorious ! With what cruelty and violence is 
he treated, and yet how peacefully does he meet death ! Whilst 
his enemies rage, he calmly commends himself to his Saviour, 
saying, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Whilst they were 
lifting up their savage hands against him, he pleads for them as 
his Master did before him : “ Lay not this sin to their charge,” 
and then he “fell asleep.” His earthly trials were then all over, 
and he passed into the peaceful presence of his Lord. 


XLIII. 

PAUL. 




AD Paul not become a Christian, he might, no doubt, 
have been the head of the Pharisaic faction in the last 
expiring struggles of his nation ; he might have rallied 
round him the nobler spirits of his countrymen, and 
by his courage and prudence have caused Jerusalem to hold out 
a few months or years more against the army of Titus. Still, at 
best, he would have been a Maccabseus or a Gamaliel; and what 
a difference to the whole subsequent fortunes of the world be- 
tween a Maccabseus and a Paul, between the Jewish rabbi and 
the apostle of the Gentiles ! It was not till the scales fell off 
from his eyes after the three days’ stupor — till the consciousness 
of his great mission awakened all his dormant energies — that we 
really see what he was. That divine Providence which, as he 
himself tells us (Gal. i. 15), had “ already separated him from 
his mother’s womb,” had no doubt overruled the circumstances 
of his earlier education for the great end to which he was after- 
ward called; in him, as in similar cases, the natural faculties 
were, by his conversion, “ not unclothed, but clothed upon ;” the 
glory of divine grace was shown here, as always, not by repress- 
ing and weakening the human character, but by bringing it out 
for the first time in its full vigor. He was still a Jew; the zeal 
of his ancestral tribe, which had caused him “ to raven as a wolf 
in the morning” of his life, still glowed in his veins when* he 
“returned in the evening to divide the spoil” of the mightier 





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PAUL . 


501 


enemy whom he had defeated and bound ; and in the unwearied 
energy and self-devotion, no less than the peculiar intensity of 
national feeling, which mark his whole life and writings, we dis- 
cern the qualities which the Jewish people alone, of all the 
nations then existing on the earth, could have furnished. But 
there were other elements which his conversion developed into 
life besides the mere enthusiasm of the Jew, shared equally with 
him by Peter. I would not lay stress on the Grecian culture 
which he might have received in the schools of Tarsus, or the 
philosophical tone which we know to have characterized the 
lectures of Gamaliel, though doubtless these had their share in 
the formation of his subsequent character. But whatever had 
been in former ages that remarkable union of qualities which 
had from the earliest times constituted the chosen people into a 
link between the East and the West, that was now in the highest 
degree exemplified in the character of Paul. Never before or 
since have the Jew and Gentile so completely met in one single 
person by an absolute though unconscious fusion of the two 
together — not founding a new system, but breathing a new spirit 
into that which already existed, and which only needed some 
such divine impulse to call it into that fullness of life which had 
been stunted only, not destroyed. He knew nothing, it may be, 
of those philosophers and historians with whom we are so familiar, 
nor can we expect to find in him the peculiar graces of Athenian 
genius; yet it is in the dialectical skill of Aristotle, the impas- 
sioned appeals of Demosthenes, the complicated sentences of 
Thucydides, far more than in the language of Moses or Solomon 
or Isaiah, that the form and structure of his arguments finds its 
natural parallel. He had never studied, it may be, or, if he had, 
would hardly have discerned, those finer feelings of humanity of 
which the germs existed in Greece and Rome; but how remark- 
ably are they exemplified in his own character ! What is that 
probing of the innermost recesses of the human heart and con- 
science — so unlike the theocratic visions of the older prophets — 


502 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


but the apostolical reflexion of the practical, individual, psycho- 
logical spirit of the Western philosophers? What is that capacity 
for throwing himself into the position and feeling of others — 
that becoming “all things to all men” which his enemies called 
worldly prudence — that intense sympathy in the strength of 
which he “ had a thousand friends, and loved each as his own 
soul, and seemed to live a thousand lives in them, and died a 
thousand deaths when he must quit them” — which “suffered 
when the weaker brother suffered ” — which would not allow him 
to eat meat “ whilst the world standeth, lest he make his brother 
to offend,” — what was all this but the effect of God’s blessing on 
that boundless versatility of nature which had formed the especial 
mark of the Grecian mind for good and evil in all ages ? What 
was it but the significant maxim of the Roman poet — “ Homo 
sum , humani nihil a me alienum puto ” 1 — transfigured for the 
first time in the heavenly radiance of truth and holiness? 

It will not be supposed that in this brief view of the outward 
aspect of Paul’s character I have attempted to give a complete 
analysis of it. I have purposely confined myself to those natural 
and moral gifts which, as they were practically called into exist- 
ence by and for the work which he was to perform, can only 
through and in that work be fully understood. There is per- 
haps no feature of the apostolical age which is more difficult for 
us to comprehend than the immense importance attached by Paul 
to so obvious a truth as the admission of the Gentiles into the 
Christian Church, still more the furious opposition by which its 
first announcement was met. Yet so it was. Other questions 
occupied the attention of the first dawn and of the final close of 
the apostolical age ; but the one question above all others which 
absorbed its mid-day prime — which is the key to almost all the 
Epistles — which is the one subject of almost the whole history 
of the Acts — was not the foundation, not the completion, of the 
Christian Church, but its universal diffusion — the destruction, 
^“Iam a man, and consider nothing human as foreign to me.” 


PAUL. 


503 


not of paganism, not of gnosticism, but of Judaism. He, there- 
fore, who stood at this juncture as the champion of this new 
truth at once drew the whole attention of the Christian world to 
himself: every other apostle recedes from our view; east and 
west, north and south, from Jerusalem to Rome, from Macedonia 
to Melita, we hear of nothing, we see nothing, but Paul and his 
opponents. 

It is only by bearing this steadily in mind that we can rightly 
conceive the nature of the conflict. He was not like a missionary 
of later times whose great work is accomplished if he can add to 
the number of his converts; he was this, but he was much more 
than this : it was not the actual conversions themselves, but the 
principle which every conversion involved — not the actual dis- 
ciples whom he gained, but he himself who dared to make them 
disciples — that constitutes the enduring interest of that life-long 
struggle. It was not merely that he reclaimed from paganism 
the Grecian cities of Asia Minor, but that at every step which he 
took westward from Palestine he tore up the prejudices of ages. 
It was not merely that he cast out the false spirit from the 
damsel at Philippi, but that when he set his foot on the farther 
shores of the HCgean Sea, religion for the first time ceased to be 
Asiatic and became European. It was not merely that at Athens 
he converted Dionysius and Damaris, but that there was seen a 
Jew standing in the court of the Areopagus and appealing to an 
Athenian audience, as children of the same Father, as worshipers, 
though unconsciously, of the same God. It was not that at 
Rome he made some impression more or less permanent on the 
slaves of the imperial palace, but that a descendant of Abraham 
recognized in the dense masses of that corrupt metropolis a field 
for his exertions as sacred as in the courts of the temple of Jeru- 
salem. It was not the Roman governor or the Ephesian mob, 
but the vast body of Judaizing Christians, which was his real 
enemy — not the worshipers of Jupiter and Diana, but those who 
made their boast of Moses and claimed to be the disciples of 


504 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


Cephas. The conflict with paganism was indeed the occasion of 
those few invaluable models of missionary preaching which are 
preserved to us in his speeches; but it is the conflict with 
Judaism which forms the one continuous subject of that far more 
elaborate and enduring record of his teaching which is preserved 
to us in his Epistles. At every step of his progress he is dogged 
by his implacable adversaries, and at every step, as he turns to 
resist them, he flings back those words of entreaty, of rebuke, 
of warning, which have become the treasures of the Christian 
Church for ever. They deny his authority, they impugn his 
motives, they raise the watchword of the law and of circum- 
cision, and the result is to be found in the early Epistles to 
Corinth, to Galatia and to Rome. They harass him in his im- 
prisonment at Rome, they blend their Jewish notions with the 
wilder theories of Oriental philosophy, and there rises before 
him, in the Epistles to Ephesus, Colosse and Philippi, the 
majestic vision of the spiritual temple which is to grow out of the 
ruins of the old — of that divine Head of the whole race of man 
before whom all temporary and transient rites, all lower forms 
of worship and philosophy, fade away, in whom, in the fullness 
of times, all things were gathered together in one. They rise 
once more in the Asiatic Churches ; all Asia is turned away from 
him; he stands almost alone under the shadow of impending 
death. But it is the last effort of a defeated and desperate cause. 
The victory is already gained, and in the three Epistles to Titus 
and Timothy we may consent to recognize the last accents of the 
aged apostle, now conscious that his contest is over ; some fore- 
bodings, indeed, we catch in them of that dark storm which was 
about to sweep, within the next few years, over the Christian 
and Jewish world alike; but their general tone is one of calm 
repose— the mid-day heat is passed away, the shades of evening 
are beginning to slope, the gleam of a brighter sky is seen 
beyond, and with the assured conviction that the object of his 
life was fully accomplished, he might well utter the words, 


PAUL. 


505 


t( I have fought the good light, I have finished my course, I have 
kept the faith.” 

To this estimate of Paul’s character and position as the great 
apostle of the Gentiles may be added a brief account of the most 
striking events of his life. Paul was born at Tarsus, the capital 
of Cilicia, and his father had obtained the privileges of a Roman 
citizen. But his family was of the purest Hebrew stock, uncon- 
taminated by the admixture of Gentile blood, and its name still 
stood on the public genealogies of Benjamin. The education of 
Paul was completed at Jerusalem, under Gamaliel. Pie seems to 
have greatly outstripped his master in zeal and fiery ardor against 
the Christians. Not content with carrying on his crusade in and 
near Jerusalem, he obtained letters from the Sanhedrim, giving 
him authority to drag to Jerusalem from Damascus any converts 
to the new heresy on whom he could lay hands. 

The distance from Jerusalem is at last traversed ; Saul and 
his companions have feasted their eves on the white buildings 
of Damascus and their groves of green — the pearl gleaming in 
its emerald setting. They have advanced far along the shady 
avenues of the celebrated groves and gardens, screened by the 
cool branches from the fierce mid-day heat. Suddenly a great 
light shines from heaven, above the brightness of the sun. A 
voice speaks to Saul in the Hebrew tongue; only two short sen- 
tences are uttered, but they come home to him with such divine 
power that in a far more profound sense than the words were 
used of his namesake, the first king of Israel, he is changed into 
“ another man.” The persecutor rises from the ground an 
apostle, and his whole energies are now consecrated to promote 
the cause which once he destroyed. 

After his baptism by Ananias, Paul preached for a short time 
in Damascus, then retired for a season into Arabia, returned 
again to Damascus, and being persecuted by the Jews, found it 
necessary to make his escape from the city by night, being let 
down in a basket from the wall. Retracing his steps, he goes 


506 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


back to Jerusalem, where he is received by the Christians with 
coldness and suspicion ; but the generous-minded Barnabas hav- 
ing warmly espoused his cause, he at last receives the right hand 
of fellowship from the brethren. He preaches Christ in the 
synagogues, but soon a conspiracy is formed against him. In a 
vision he is instructed by Christ to leave Jerusalem and count 
the Gentile world his sphere of labor. Accordingly, he quitted 
the capital of Judaism after but a fortnight’s stay, and leaving 
Palestine by Caesarea, went to Tarsus, where he remained for a 
time in obscurity. 

Meanwhile other events were going on in Palestine, designed 
to show more clearly how the Gentiles were to be welcomed into 
the Christian Church. Peter had his vision at Joppa, and paid 
his visit to Caesarea, where he baptized Cornelius, a Roman 
officer, and his Gentile friends. Word came to the apostles, at 
Jerusalem, of the conversion of Gentiles in places so remote as 
Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch, and Barnabas, a man in whom 
fatherly kindness and a sound Christian judgment were finely 
blended, was sent to Antioch to guide and confirm the converts. 
Retaining his friendly interest in Paul, and thinking him a suit- 
able co-worker, he went to Tarsus for him and brought him to 
Antioch. For a year the two evangelists labored in that city, 
and it seems to have been at this time that the new and glorious 
name of Christians was first given to the converts. 

When these evangelistic labors were begun at Antioch, it was 
a great and wicked city. Luxurious Romans were attracted by 
its beautiful climate, but for the most part its population was a 
worthless rabble of Greeks and Orientals. The frivolous amuse- 
ments of the theatre were the occupation of their life. It is 
probable that no populations have ever been more abandoned 
than those of Oriental Greek cities under the Roman empire, 
and of these cities Antioch was the greatest and the worst. If 
we wish to realize the appearance of the complicated heathenism 
of the first Christian century, we must endeavor to imagine the 


PAUL. 


507 


scene of that suburb — the famous Daphne with its fountains and 
groves of bay trees, its bright buildings, its crowds of licentious 
votaries, its statue of Apollo, where, under the climate of Syria 
and the wealthy patronage of Rome, all that was beautiful in 
nature and in art had created a sanctuary for a perpetual festival 
of vice. 

After laboring some time at Antioch, Paul and Barnabas were 
called by the Lord to missionary work in other districts, and 
solemnly set apart by the Church for this purpose. At Paphos 
the Roman governor became a convert. A Jewish sorcerer 
named Bar-jesus, or, in Greek, Ely mas, made a vehement effort 
to withstand the apostles and prevent the conversion of the 
governor. The trade of sorcery was exceedingly common in 
those times, and the lower classes of Jews, both men and women, 
were much addicted to it. They ministered to that eager desire 
to know the secrets of the future which is common to man, which 
was especially active in this age of general excitement and ex- 
pectation, and which, now that the great heathen oracles were 
silent, had scarcely any other outlet. The fame of the Hebrew 
prophets gave Jews a preference in the practice of this art, as it 
would generally be believed that they knew most of the future. 
The contest with this sorcerer was Paul’s first great battle. Full 
of faith and power, he rebuked his countryman in language of 
stunning intensity, and brought temporary blindness upon him. 
The effect on the mind of the governor was favorable — he be- 
came a firm believer. 

After visiting various places, the apostles came to Lystra, 
where the miraculous cure of a lame man caused them to be mis- 
taken for Jupiter and Mercury. The fickle multitude, who at 
first proposed to worship them, being stirred up by Jews who 
followed them from other towns, ended by stoning them, and 
Paul was so hurt that he was left for dead. Among those who 
may have gazed on his seemingly lifeless face was a young Greek 
who had listened to his words with no common emotion. 


508 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


Timothy, his own son in the faith, seems now to have heard the 
gospel for the first time. Well instructed in the Scriptures 
though he was by his Jewish mother and grandmother, probably 
till now he had never obtained the key to their meaning. After 
Paul’s visit, the reading of the Scriptures would be prosecuted 
with fresh zest in that sweet domestic circle, and the young 
Greek would become familiar with the great “ mystery of godli- 
ness” which his life was to be spent in proclaiming. 

Paul and Barnabas, having returned to Antioch, were sent 
from there to Jerusalem, to obtain from the mother Church a 
deliverance on the subject of circumcision. The apostles and 
elders came together, and Peter made a strong address, urging 
that they should not put a yoke on the neck of the disciples 
which neither they nor their fathers were able to bear. Then 
Paul and Barnabas declared what God had wrought among the 
Gentiles by them. After an address by James, a letter was 
written instructing the Gentile Christians that it was not neces- 
sary for them to be circumcised and keep the- Jewish law, but 
recommending them to abstain from meats offered to idols, and 
from blood, and from things strangled, and from the lascivious 
feasts connected with idol-worship. Judas, surnamed Barsabas, 
and Silas were sent to Antioch to make the same communication 
orally. The deliverance was very satisfactory to the Gentile 
Church, and occasioned much rejoicing. 

From a statement of Paul in the Epistle to the Galatians, it 
would seem to have been about this time that Peter paid a visit 
to Antioch, and the two great apostles came into collision. Paul 
says that he “ withstood Peter to the face because he was to be 
blamed ;” that “ the other Jews dissembled with him and that 
“ Barnabas also was carried away with their dissimulation.” It 
is pleasing to notice that after this hot, angry strife, Peter’s 
generous nature — impulsive, yet rich in love — leads him to write 
very tenderly of his “ beloved brother Paul.” 2 Pet. iii. 15. 

An ingenious writer gives us a description of the personal ap- 


PAUL . 


509 


pearan^e of these two apostles, founded partly on tradition. Paul 
is set before us with the strongly-marked and prominent features 
of a Jew, yet not without some of the finer lines indicative of 
Greek thought. His stature was diminutive, and his body dis- 
figured by some lameness or distortion, which may have pro- 
voked the contemptuous expressions of his enemies. His beard 
was long and thin, but his head was bald. The characteristics 
of his face were, a transparent complexion, which visibly be- 
trayed the quick changes of his feelings; a bright gray eye, 
under thickly overhanging united eyebrows; a cheerful and win- 
ning expression of countenance, which invited the approach and 
inspired the confidence of strangers. It would be natural to 
infer, from his continued journeyings and manual labor, that he 
was possessed of great strength of constitution. But men of 
delicate health have often gone through the greatest exertions; 
and his own words on more than one occasion show that he 
suffered much from bodily infirmity. Peter is represented to us 
as a man of larger and stronger form, as his character was more 
abrupt. The quick impulses of his soul revealed themselves in 
the flashes of a dark eye. The complexion of his face was pale 
and sallow, and the short hair, which is described as entirely 
gray at the time of his death, curled black and thick round his 
temples and his chin when the two apostles stood together at 
Antioch, twenty years before their martyrdom. 

After a short time Paul proposed to Barnabas that they should 
make a tour of inspection, visiting and watering the churches 
which they had formerly planted. An unhappy quarrel took 
place between them, occasioned by the desire of Barnabas to 
take his nephew Mark along with them, and Paul's want of 
thorough confidence in Mark, caused by his having left them in 
Pamphylia. As the two apostles could not agree, they took 
separate routes, Barnabas and Mark going to Cyprus, while 
Paul, accompanied by Silas, traversed a large portion of the 
provinces of Asia Minor. 


510 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


In these events we see that the apostles were fallible, like the 
good men whose lives are recorded in the Old Testament, and 
like the best men of the present day. Paul, though a good and 
great man, was not perfect any more than other men. The 
strong will and absolute confidence in the correctness of his own 
opinions, which made him the bitterest of persecutors while a 
Jew, still showed themselves after the great change which made 
him a Christian and the apostle of the Gentiles. 

To say that Paul acted from principle in these “sharp con- 
tentions” does not alter the aspects of the case. Who ever heard 
of a church quarrel, or quarrel between ministers, where both 
parties were not equally conscientious and most steadfast ad- 
herents of principle? But a little more humility and less of 
human nature would lead to the discovery of some way by which 
difficulties could be adjusted and compromised without any sacri- 
fice of principle. When we consider the obligations of Paul to 
the generous and noble-hearted Barnabas, it is hard for us to 
apologize for his refusal to permit his friend’s nephew to accom- 
pany them, even though Mark’s conduct on a former occasion 
may have been worthy of censure. 

I know it is common, where Paul appears in antagonism with 
other Christians in the sacred narrative, to take it for granted, 
as he did himself, that he was right and they were wrong. But 
this is no more just or reasonable than it would be in the case of 
any other Scripture character or of any good man in our own 
times. The great reverence in which Paul has been held since 
the Reformation should not make us unjust to those who were 
associated with him in founding Christianity, nor lead us to give 
greater weight to his writings than to other portions of the word 
of God. This was Luther’s mistake. Because in his judgment 
the letter of James conflicted with the doctrine of Paul, he called 
it an “epistle of straw,” and denied its canonical authority. 
Unconsciously to ourselves, we may fall into substantially the 
same error. We may have our favorite author and passages in 


PAUL. 


511 


the Bible, and wrest the other scriptures from their plain and 
obvious meaning, to make them harmonize with what we are 
practically making a higher authority. 

But after all that can be made of the few occasions in which 
Paul appears in an unpleasant attitude toward the other apostles 
— exhibiting infirmities common to him with other historical 
personages, secular or scriptural — he remains a great and exalted 
character, towering far above ordinary men, and leaving not 
merely a distinguished example, but a mass of solid and perma- 
nent truth, wedged in amid the temporary discussions of his day. 
With justifiable egotism he points to his heroic sacrifices in the 
cause of Christ. Looking at the vast work he accomplished, the 
opposition he met, the difficulties he surmounted, we cannot 
blame Paul for his self-commendation. Men and their words 
are to be judged according to circumstances. “ In labors more 
abundant, in stripes above measure, in prisons more frequent, in 
deaths oft. Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save 
one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice 
I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep ; 
in journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in 
perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in 
perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, 
in perils among false brethren ; in weariness and painfulness, in 
watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold 
and nakedness.” 

Following the narrative of these abundant labors, after Paul’s 
separation from Barnabas, we find him visiting Syria and Cilicia; 
then, striking up in a north-westerly course through one of the 
“gates” or passes of the Taurus, he returned to Derbe and 
Lystra. Great must have been his joy to find his young friend 
Timothy so strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus, and so 
well reported of by the brethren at Lystra and Iconium. It 
would be with mingled emotions of joy and sorrow that his 
grandmother and mother saw Timothy depart with Paul and 


512 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


Silas into the wild regions of Galatia and Phrygia — -joy that lie 
was going on so holy and honorable an errand, sorrow at their 
separation from one whom they had so tenderly nurtured, and at 
the probable hardships he would be forced to undergo. 

Paul now entered on new ground and came among a new race. 
The Galatians, as the first syllable of their name implies, were 
of Gallic origin ; four centuries before, their ancestors had wor- 
shiped under the oaks of Gaul. They had been borne along in 
an emigration that at last brought them from the west of Europe 
to the west of Asia. The invasions of Pome and Greece by the 
Gauls are familiar events of history. The Galatians, or Gallo- 
Grecians, were connected with the latter event, but, repulsed 
from Greece, crossed the JEgean and settled in the centre of Asia 
Minor. Like the race to which they belonged, they were sus- 
ceptible of quick impressions and sudden changes, with a fickle- 
ness equal to their courage and enthusiasm. 

After traversing Phrygia and Galatia, Paul came to Troas, 
which still preserved the immortal name of Troy. It must have 
been with thrilling interest that the apostle gazed upon the 
famous plain where, at the dawn of Grecian history, the whole 
forces of the Greeks had spent their strength for ten years in 
the siege of Troy, and whose every locality had been invested by 
the genius of Homer with an interest that would survive to the 
end of time. But still more intense must have been his feelings 
when, from the top of the classic Mount Ida, he looked across 
the Hellespont, and for the first time in his life beheld the blue 
summits of the European hills. Here a vision appeared to him 
in the night; “ there stood a man of Macedonia, and prayed, 
saying, Come over into Macedonia and help us.” 

That cry of distress was not to be disregarded. Next morning 
Paul and his companions, of whom the beloved physician LuKe 
was now one, might be seen on the quay of Troas, eagerly inquiring 
for the first ship to Macedonia. The wind wafts them through the 
seas that bore, five hundred years before, the magnificent armada 


PAUL. 


513 


of Xerxes. The story of the shepherd’s sling and stone is again 
ibout to be realized. These four humble men in the Trojan ship 
are to accomplish what the millions of Xerxes failed to accom- 
plish — conquer Greece and Europe too. 

The first campaign of the gospel of Jesus Christ in Europe was 
fought in Macedonia ; Philippi, Thessalonica and Berea were the 
principal battle-fields. Philippi was a Roman “ colony;” the 
word denotes a sort of epitome of Rome itself, when the privi- 
leges of Romans were held peculiarly sacred. Being more of a 
military than a commercial city, it had no Jewish synagogue ; 
but devout proselytes and Jews assembled in a prayer- meeting 
by a river-side. A woman in middle life, the head of a house, 
a girl possessed by a demon and a cruel jailer were among 
the persons first struck down at Philippi by the arrows of the 
King. The benign influence of Christianity in Europe, in ele- 
vating woman and then making use of her gentle instrumentality 
for promoting the cause of Christ, as well as in subduing the 
most rugged passions of man, seems to have been foreshadowed 
by these conversions. The freeness of the salvation of the gospel 
was at the same time gloriously exhibited in the brief and 
memorable reply to the jailer’s question, “ What must I do to be 
saved?” — “ Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be 
saved.” The sustaining and consoling power of divine grace was 
also beautifully exhibited by Paul and Silas, who prayed and 
sung praises by night, in the gloomy vaults of the prison, while 
suffering the agony of the scourge and the stocks. Philippi could 
have borne sad testimony to the opposite course to which misery 
and disgrace drive unconverted men, for it was there that both 
Brutus and Cassius had destroyed themselves. When the jailer 
was about to follow their example, the voice of the Christian 
apostle was heard saying, “Do thyself no harm.” 

From Philippi the apostle proceeded to Thessalonica, an im- 
portant and busy seaport with a Jewish synagogue. Here a 
delightful little Christian community was gathered together, 

33 


514 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


whose “work of faith, labor of love and patience of hope” shone 
long afterward, in the memory of the apostle, like a green oasis 
in the desert. From this busy place the holy fame of the new 
religion, which was embraced by many of the old pagans, sounded 
out through all the neighboring districts of Macedonia on the 
north and Achaia on the south. 

But persecution drove Paul from Thessalonica, as it had driven 
him from Philippi. He took refuge in the provincial town of 
Berea, where, through the diligent study of the Scriptures, many 
Jews were converted, and also some of the principal Gentiles. 
The signs of another gathering storm led the brethren in haste to 
send Paul away, while Silas and Timothy remained at Berea. 
A ship bound for Athens conveyed the apostle from the shore 
where Olympus, dark with woods, rises from the plain to the 
broad summit glittering with snow, which was the home of the 
Homeric gods. The shepherds from the heights above the vale 
of Tempe may have watched the sails of his ship that day, as it 
moved like a white speck over the outer waters of the Thermaic 
Gulf. The sailors, looking back from the deck, saw the great 
Olympus rising close above them in snowy majesty. The white 
speck was wafting to the classic shores of Athens the Hebrew 
preacher, through whose doctrine the gods of Olympus were to 
be dethroned for ever, and a purer heaven and a holier life and a 
brighter immortality presented to Grecian eyes than had yet been 
dreamt of in all their philosophy. 

It would occupy far too much space to describe all the objects 
that Paul would see, or to fancy all the emotions that would fill 
his mind, when his ship rode into the harbor of Piraeus, and he 
himself, after passing between the Long Walls that connected the 
port and the city, found himself fronting the Acropolis of Athens. 
One thought can hardly have been absent from his mind : in 
Athens he would see mankind in the circumstances most favor- 
able to the natural man ; for if mental culture could enlighten, 
if the fine arts could purify, if philosophy could elevate, if poetry 


PAUL. 


515 


could sweeten, if the pagan religion could transform, the Athenians 
2ould not but be an enlightened, a pure, a noble, a genial, a holy 
people. As he walks through the city, he sees everywhere statues 
of deified heroes as well as the older gods; shrines and temples 
of every size and form, from the niche in the rock to the mag- 
nificent Parthenon ; groups of statuary representing the old 
legends of mythology of which he used to read as a schoolboy ; 
and among the rest, that altar of which he made good use in his 
speech — “ To the unknown God.” But Athens is the seat of 
philosophy as well as the headquarters of mythology. Two sects 
especially were encountered by him — the Stoics and the Epi- 
cureans. The Stoics enforced a sort of stern virtue, a high dis- 
regard alike of pleasure and of pain, that sometimes led to noble 
deeds in those evil times, but not less seldom to such mournful 
results as the suicide of their first two leaders, Zeno and Cleanthes, 
and of their most illustrious Roman adherents, Cato and Seneca. 
Pride was the great characteristic of the Stoic. The Epicureans 
were the children of pleasure — almost deriding the notion of a God, 
and encouraging men to live and die in indifference and ease. 

On three different spots Paul bore testimony to the truth at 
Athens. The first was the synagogue of the Jews ; the next was 
a more public platform — the Agora or market-place, the com- 
mon meeting-place of the Athenians, to which they were always 
carried when there was anything to gratify that craving for news 
and excitement which even four centuries before had been re- 
buked in them by Demosthenes. Some of the philosophers who 
heard Paul here, wishing to listen to him in a quieter and more 
solemn place, took him to Areopagus, or Mars’ Hill — the place 
where the judges had sat from time immemorial, to decide causes, 
civil and religious. It was a scene with which the dread recol- 
lections of centuries were associated. It was a place of silent awe 
in the midst of the gay and frivolous city. No place in Athens 
was so suitable for a discourse upon the mysteries of religion. 
Here, gazing on the splendid temple of the Parthenon, Paul 


516 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


taught that God dwelleth not in temples made with hands. 
Under shade of the colossal statue of Minerva, armed with spear, 
shield and helmet, as the champion of Athens, he declared that 
the Godhead is not like unto gold or silver or stone, graven by 
art and man’s device. Here he taught the scoffing Epicureans 
that the world was not an accidental concourse of atoms, but that 
it was created by God. Here he summoned the proud and 
haughty Stoic to repent of all his wickedness, and foretold the 
coming of a terrible day of retribution by God’s Son, of which 
the certain pledge had been given to all men, in that he had 
raised him from the dead. The philosophers derided his doc- 
trine, or treated it with indifference, and Paul, in one of his after 
letters, could only speak of the gospel as “ to the Greek, foolish- 
ness.” Dionysius, one of the judges of the Areopagus, believed, 
and a few others; but Athens, polite, refined, intellectual, was 
not one of the places where the gospel triumphed. 

Paul had paid his visit to Athens alone ; but at Corinth, to 
which he next proceeded, he was joined by Silas and Timothy. 
On his way to Corinth he determined that he should make the 
one great subject of his preaching there “ Jesus Christ, and him 
crucified.” Corinth was now the actual capital of Greece. The 
celebrated peninsula, the strifes and struggles of whose republics 
form so large a chapter of ancient history, had been formed by 
the Romans into the province of Achaia, with Corinth, situated 
on the isthmus, or “ bridge of the Peloponnesus,” for its capital. 
Corinth was a place of great commercial activity. By its sea- 
port on the w r est it communicated with Europe, and by that on 
the east with Asia. It was pre-eminently noted for its licen- 
tiousness. In a temple dedicated to Venus, a thousand harlots 
were supported, in honor of the goddess, at the public expense. 
It abounded with fornicators and idolaters and adulterers and 
effeminate and abusers of themselves with mankind; with 
thieves, with covetous, with drunkards, with revilers and with 
extortioners. 1 Cor. vi. 9, 10. 


PAUL. 


517 


At Corinth, Paul took up his abode with Aquila and Priscilla, 
a countryman and country woman who, with the rest of the Jews, 
had lately been expelled by Claudius from Rome. According to 
Suetonius, the Roman historian, the Jews were always exciting 
tumults, at the instance of one Chrestus. The origin of this 
charge probably was that they were exciting tumults against 
those who worshiped Christ. Doubtless Aquila and Priscilla 
would give Paul much information about Rome, and perhaps 
excite that desire to visit it which he began to feel. At Corinth, 
Paul had great success. Crispus, the ruler of a synagogue, be- 
came a convert — a circumstance that must have caused great 
excitement. Yet Paul’s spirit was burdened and depressed. 
That which distressed him was the bitter and blasphemous oppo- 
sition to the truth which the Jews were ever exciting. But the 
Lord mercifully encouraged him in a vision, and for a year and 
a half he continued to labor at Corinth. It was now that he 
wrote his two epistles to the Thessalonians — the earliest of all 
his recorded letters. At last, having a strong desire to be present 
at one of the festivals at Jerusalem, he set sail for the holy city, 
taking Ephesus on his way. Promising to try to return to 
Ephesus, he went on to Jerusalem, and after his visit returned 
to Antioch, thus completing his second great missionary tour. 

The third missionary campaign of the apostle — during all of 
which he had Timothy for his companion — opened in Phrygia 
and Galatia, where he had been before. But the chief place to 
which his attention was directed in this tour was Ephesus. 
There the way had been prepared for him by the preaching of 
Apollos, an eloquent Jew of Alexandria, well versed in the 
Scriptures, who, however, was only a disciple of John the Bap- 
tist, and had to be instructed in Christian truth. Ephesus, 
situated at the mouth of the Cayster, was the chief city of the 
district to which the name of Asia was first restricted. Its in- 
habitants were half Greek, half Asiatic, and their religion and 
superstitions were a compound of the East and the West. Sorcery 


518 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


or magic — an importation of the East — was exceedingly common. 
Diana, a goddess of the West, was the great object of worship ; 
but the style of worship had in it much of Oriental mystery and 
magnificence. The temple of Diana or Artemis, at Ephesus, was 
renowned over the whole world. It had been two hundred and 
twenty years in building. Its roof was supported by one hun- 
dred and twenty-seven columns, sixty feet high, the gifts of as 
many kings. The image of Diana, believed to have fallen from 
heaven, was but of wood, and thus formed a striking contrast to 
the magnificence around. Ephesus was notorious, besides, both 
for its luxury and licentiousness. 

Yet, from the materials which this wicked place furnished, 
one of the most beautiful and interesting of all the ancient 
churches was formed. Rev. ii. 2, 3. No epistle glows with more 
satisfaction and joyful remembrance than that of Paul to the 
Ephesians. Even from among the exorcists many converts were 
obtained, and the value of the books of magic, which they com- 
mitted to the flames in token of their sincerity, exceeded ten 
thousand dollars of our money. The religious change was be- 
coming so great that the craftsmen who gained their living by 
making silver models of the statue of Diana became alarmed and 
raised an insurrection. The apostle and his companion were 
rescued from their danger through the eloquence of one of the 
magistrates of the place, but they were not able to remain in 
Ephesus. After bidding the church farewell, Paul proceeded to 
visit the churches of Macedonia. It appears to have been at 
Ephesus that he wrote his First Epistle to the Corinthians. 
1 Cor. xvi. 8. 

On leaving Ephesus, Paul first went to Troas, where he 
preached with great success (2 Cor. ii. 12); then proceeded to 
Macedonia and the countries of Greece lying to the north. He 
seems at this time to have been in a dejected state of mind. At 
Philippi he wrote the Second Epistle to the Corinthians. He 
was now actively engaged in a scheme for collecting money for 


PAUL. 


510 


the poor believers in Judea, designed to show the good will of 
the Gentiles, and to soften down the bitter feeling of the Jewish 
Church toward their uncircumcised brethren. Titus, to whom 
one of the pastoral letters was afterward written, was specially 
employed by him in promoting this collection. Hearing that 
Judaizing teachers had been corrupting the church of Galatia, 
he wrote the Epistle to the Galatians, powerfully refuting and 
remonstrating against the errors in question. Three months 
were then spent in Corinth, and the Epistle to the Romans was 
then written and despatched by Phebe. It is remarkable that no 
mention is made of any apostle or other celebrated man having 
founded the church at Rome. It was probably quietly formed 
by converts to Christianity who either left the Jewish synagogue 
at Rome or came to the city from other countries. 

Leaving Europe, Paul now directed his course to Jerusalem. 
He proceeded by sea, and his voyage was full of interest. After 
spending a week at Troas, taking a most affectionate farewell of 
the Ephesian Christians at Miletus, and touching at Coos, 
Rhodes and Patara, the apostle and his companions sailed to 
Tyre. A church had existed there since the persecution at the 
death of Stephen, and there were now not only Christians but 
prophets in what had once been a great stronghold of Baal and 
Ashtoreth. Leaving Tyre, the party saluted the brethren at 
Ptolemais, and at length reached Caesarea. From that place, in 
opposition to the remonstrances of the evangelist Philip and 
other friends, who dreaded the excited feelings of the Jews, Paul 
traveled to Jerusalem, where he was received kindly by James 
and the elders, and refreshed them by telling what God had 
been doing among the Gentiles. 

We can only refer in general terms to the occurrences that 
took place while Paul was in Palestine. The hatred toward 
him of that part of the church which was leavened with the 
spirit of the Pharisees found a speedy outlet. On a false clamor 
being raised, he was beaten by the people in the temple, rescued, 


520 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


however, by the Roman soldiers, and carried to the neighboring 
fort and barrack of Antonia; there he was about to be put to the 
rack, but escaped the torture by declaring himself a Roman 
citizen ; was tried before the Sanhedrim, as Stephen had been 
twenty-five years before, when he was himself a virulent perse- 
cutor; received in a vision a cheering promise of protection from 
God; and a plot against his life being discovered, was sent, with 
a large escort, by night, to the Roman capital, Caesarea. The 
places through which he passed were fitted to encourage faith 
and fortitude. It would be interesting to fancy his feelings as 
about midnight he passed Beth-horon the nether, and gazed, 
perhaps, on the moon looking down on the valley of Ajalon, 
where, fifteen hundred years before, it had lingered to witness 
the triumph of Joshua. The light of the morning sun, rising 
behind the snowy crest of Hermon, would find him in the plain 
of Sharon, and as he rode along, the rose of Sharon and the lily 
of the valleys at his feet, and the young roe sporting on the 
mountains of Bether on his right, would carry his mind to the 
Song of Solomon, and assure him both of the love and presence 
of his Lord. In the after part of the day, he and the seventy 
troopers that accompanied him, after passing the colossal statues 
of Julius Caesar and Rome that adorned the new capital, would 
dismount from their weary horses at the barracks of Caesarea. 

The Roman governor resident at Caesarea at this time was 
Claudius Felix, an unscrupulous, sensual profligate, whose wife, 
Drusilla, was a daughter of Herod Agrippa I. On his first ap- 
pearance before Felix, Paul was remanded, under pretence of being 
tried again ; the next time, in presence of Drusilla, he made 
Felix tremble as he reasoned of righteousness, temperance and 
judgment to come; after that he was kept a prisoner at Caesarea 
for two years. At the end of that period Felix was recalled 
from Palestine, and Porcius Festus sent as governor in his room. 
Paul was now tried again, and on this occasion took his memor- 
able appeal to Caesar. In the mean time, Herod Agrippa II., king 


pa UL. 


521 


of Chalcis, in Syria, with his sister Bernice, having come on a 
risit to Caesarea, Paul was brought before them, and in another 
powerful address “ almost persuaded Agrippa to be a Christian.” 
His appeal to Caesar could be heard nowhere but at Rome ; and 
soon after, under charge of a centurion of Augustus’ band, named 
Julius, Paul, with other prisoners, set sail in a ship bound for 
Adramyttium, for the metropolis of the world. 

The record of Paul’s voyage to Rome, in the twenty-seventh 
chapter of Acts, is remarkably interesting, partly for the inci- 
dents that occurred, partly for its minute information respecting 
the seamanship of the time, and partly also for the wonderful 
verification of the narrative, in its minutest particulars, which 
modern inquiry has supplied. The vessel, on leaving the great 
dock constructed by Herod at Caesarea, touched at Sidon ; then 
passing to the north of Cyprus, through the gulfs of Cilicia and 
Pamphylia, afforded the apostle a view — probably his last — of 
his native mountains. At Myra, in Lycia, a ship was found 
chartered for Rome, to which the prisoners were transferred. 
After creeping along slowly as far as Cnidus, adverse winds 
forced the ship out of her direct course, compelling her to pass 
southward, under lee of the island of Crete, as far as the harbor 
called Fair Havens. After waiting long for a favorable breeze, 
the vessel set sail, but had not proceeded far when she was 
caught by a furious gale from the north-east. The crew seem 
to have turned round the right side of the vessel to the wind, 
and allowed her to be carried along, on the starboard tack, in a 
westerly direction. In the circumstances it is reckoned that she 
would drift at the rate of about a mile and a half in the hour. 
After a fortnight of discomfort and terror that can hardly be 
conceived, the sailors became sensible, one midnight, that they 
were approaching land. The ship was immediately anchored 
astern, and daylight anxiously waited for. When it came, it 
was observed that a creek ran into the shore. Into this creek 
the vessel was attempted to be run, but in the attempt her bow 


522 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


stuck fast in the bottom. Partly by swimming, and partly 
through the aid of boards and broken pieces of the ship, all the 
passengers, who were two hundred and seventy-six in number, 
got safely to land. 

In the course of this fearful voyage Paul distinguished him- 
self very greatly by his presence of mind, his sagacious advice, 
his regard to the welfare of his fellow-passengers, and his bound- 
less confidence in God. At an early period of the storm he had 
relieved many hearts by telling of a vision in which God’s angel 
had assured him that the lives of all should be preserved. He 
had prevailed on the party to refresh themselves with food after 
a very long fast, and had prevented the stealthy escape of the 
sailors when their approach to land was first discovered. The 
wonderful influence which the poor prisoner in chains acquired 
in the ship was a proof, not only of his native vigor of mind, but 
of the calmness and wisdom, in the hour of danger, which he had 
got from fellowship with God. 

The island on which the ship was cast was Malta — now a 
part of the British possessions. The bay where the shipwreck 
occurred still bears the name of St. Paul, and all the circum- 
stances of the shipwreck, as recorded in the Acts, agree wonder- 
fully with existing appearances. The island was inhabited by a 
people of Phoenician origin. After spending three months among 
them, Paul and his companions embarked in another vessel; 
touched at Syracuse in Sicily; had to wait at Rhegium for a 
favorable wind to carry them through the Straits of Messina; 
and at last, after gazing on the smoking crater of Vesuvius and 
the lovely scenery of the Bay of Naples, landed at Puteoli. 

From this seaport to Rome — a distance of one hundred and 
fifty miles — the apostle traveled by land. Advancing by the 
Appian Way, he would pass countless localities, memorable bv 
associations both with the mythology and the history of the 
Romans, which would send through his breast the thrill of 
emotion with which every scholar looks for the first time on 


PAUL. 


523 


classic scenes. At Appii Forum, fifty mi/es from Rome, and 
again at the Three Taverns, deputations from the Christians of 
the city came to offer to the great apostle of the Gentiles the 
expression of their deep regard and affection. From a height 
about ten miles distant from Rome he would catch his first view 
of the imperial city — a vast conglomeration of houses, the homes 
of two millions of people. At last he is in the streets of Rome. 
Its palaces, its temples, its aqueducts, its theatres and its columns 
rise on every side. The long-cherished desire of his heart is 
fulfilled — he is to hear the echoes of salvation reverberated from 
the seven hills of Rome. 

Never was a city in greater need of a regenerating gospel. 
Corruption and profligacy in every form were at their height. 
Crimes far too abominable to be named were openly committed 
and witnessed in the houses of the first families. The emperor 
Nero, though only in his twenty-fourth year, had begun his 
awful course of crime — had already stained his hands in the 
blood of his mother and his wife, and was living under the in- 
fluence of his mistress, the infamous Poppsea, a proselyte to 
Judaism. The free citizens were more than a million, the slaves 
about the same in number. Rome was like London, with all 
its miseries, follies and vices exaggerated, and without Chris- 
tianity. 

At first Paul endeavored to make impressions on the Jewish 
inhabitants, but his efforts were in vain. He then turned to 
the Gentiles, with whom he had much greater success. For two 
years he continued a prisoner, dwelling in his own lodging, but 
constantly chained to a Roman soldier. Some of these soldiers 
appear to have been converted to Christ — won, very probably, 
not less through the influence of his consistent example and 
loving spirit than the force of his arguments. Even in Nero’s 
palace converts were made through his instrumentality. It is 
certain that the Roman church increased amazingly, because, a 
year or two after, the number of Christians who were slaughtered 


524 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


by Nero was enormous. During these two years were written 
the Epistles to Philemon, the Colossians, the Ephesians and the 
Philippians. 

At last Paul’s trial came on : most probably it was conducted 
in the immediate presence of Nero. The narrative of Acts comes 
abruptly to a close before telling the result. It is from Paul’s 
epistles we learn that he was set free. How the remaining por- 
tion of his life was spent can be gathered only from indirect 
notices in his letters and the statements of uninspired writers. 

It is generally believed that from Home he w r ent to Asia 
Minor, and from there to Macedonia. He seems then to have 
gone to Spain, where he is thought to have spent two years. 
Returning to Ephesus, he found matters in a somewhat critical 
condition. In Crete, too, which he visited about this time, he 
found much cause for anxiety. False teachers were busy per- 
verting the truth and sapping the foundation of Christianity. 
The First Epistle to Timothy and the Epistle to Titus seem to 
have been written about this time, instructing these faithful men, 
who were laboring respectively in Ephesus and in Crete, to resist 
all false doctrine and zealously maintain the truth. Perhaps the 
Epistle to the Hebrews was also written about this time, but its 
date as well as its authorship is uncertain. 

Paul had hoped to spend the winter at Nicopolis, in Mace- 
donia, but he was not allowed to remain there. He was arrested 
on a new charge, and hurried to Rome to stand a second trial. 
Since he had been last at Rome, Nero had conducted himself in a 
very shameful way. More than half the city had been burned 
by an awful fire, which lasted for six days, and which some 
ascribe to Nero himself. The blame was laid by him upon the 
Christians, who were now an exceedingly numerous body. A 
frightful persecution raged against them. “ Some were crucified ; 
some disguised in the skins of beasts and hunted to death with 
dogs; some were wrapped in robes impregnated with inflam- 
mable materials and set on fire at night, that they might serve 


PAUL. 


525 


to illuminate the circus of the Vatican and the gardens of Nero, 
where this diabolical monster exhibited the agonies of his vic- 
tims to the public, and gloated over them.” The number who 
perished was very great. Paul's privileges on his second confine- 
ment seem to have been much smaller than on his first. The 
Second Epistle to Timothy was now written by him, in the full 
expectation of being speedily offered up. When brought to 
trial, in presence of a large number of leading men, he was 
enabled to make a bold statement of the gospel. But no defence 
could avail against the will of Nero. The apostle, on being 
called a second time, was condemned. Near the spot now occu- 
pied by the English cemetery, his head was struck from his 
body. Devout men carried the headless corpse to the catacombs, 
or subterranean vaults below Borne, to which in after times the 
martyrs used often to fly for concealment. There, in some un- 
known vault, rests the body of the greatest of apostles, awaiting 
the fulfillment of the words so nobly applied by himself — 
“ Death shall be swallowed up of victory.” 

AT OESAR’S BAR. 

“At my first answer no man stood by me,” 

So spake he, Paul, the prisoner of the Lord. 

Alone before the imperial majesty 

He stood, unawed by either fire or cord. 

The haughty ruler over many a land 
Frowns from the judgment-seat, and round his throne 

Rome’s dark-browed senators, a sullen band, 

Gaze with stern eyes on him who stands alone. 

All round the hall fierce eyes of soldiers gleam, 

With clash of armor moving to and fro; 

’Twixt frequent pillars shines old Tiber’s stream, 

And the Eternal City, stretched below. 

Close round the bases of the Palatine 
Clusters the flat-roofed town, and spreading fills 

The broad Campagna, almost to the line, 

Distant and purple, of the Alban hills. 


52*5 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


Up the steep path had Paul the prisoner trod, 

Past Caesar’s prison and his palace-gate, 

Past the proud shrine of the triumphant god, 

To where, the crown of all, sits Caesar throned in state. 

Before the massive bar he stands, 

A bar of solid marble graven, 

And lays on it his fettered hands, 

And speaks of love, and hope, and heaven. 

And smiles; for he is not alone, 

Though none may see his present Friend, 

His best-beloved, his faithful One, 

Who will stand with him to the end. 

What though that end be present pain 
And death, his Lord will still deliver. 

Death has no sting; yea, death is gain, 

For it is life with him for ever. 

Long ages passed, the mighty empire fell, 

The Caesar’s palace lost in ruins lay; 

Nor portico nor pillar stood to tell 
Where Caesar once had held imperial sway. 

Then came an hour when the workman’s spade 
Disturbed the dust that ages gathered there; 

Outlines of hall and temple bare were laid, 

The shattered column and the crumbled stair. 

Strange, ’mid the ruins of the Palatine 
One fragment stands: a marble bar, snow-white, 

Carved from the solid mass, with trellised line 
Still clear and sharp as when it first saw light. 

u And here,” they say, “ was Caesar’s judgment-hall, 

This marble bar once fenced his ivory seat; 

Here before Nero once stood holy Paul.” 

O precinct hallowed by the martyr’s feet! 

Here many a stranger from a far-off land 
Pauses to gaze where Paul once took his stand; 

Before him at the bar he sees the saint, 

Almost he hears the glowing words outpoured, 

Almost he sees the presence, fair and faint, 

Of Him who stood beside, the martyr’s Lord. 










XLIV. 

BAEKABAS. 

sacred or profane history we find few characters more 
miable or worthy of imitation than Barnabas. His 
indly disposition, and the service which he rendered 
3 Paul, constitute him a good representative of per- 
sonal friendship. If in any one, among the associates of the 
apostle, the idea of companionship is, as it were, personified, that 
one is Barnabas. Something of this characteristic is made known 
to us in the designation which the earlier apostles gave to him 
when they styled him the “ son of consolation.” It is probable, 
indeed, that this title had reference chiefly to his power of warm 
and instructive “ exhortation ;” but even if thus interpreted, it 
reveals to us social qualities of high value, and certainly his 
actions are in harmony with this power of giving encouragement 
by his words. 

In those happy earliest days of the Church, when “the multi- 
tude of them that believed were of one heart and one soul ” — 
when none of them said “ that aught of the things which he 
possessed was his own,” and consequently “none among them 
lacked”- — Barnabas, “a Levite of the island of Cyprus,” is the 
one among the disciples who is specified as “selling his land, 
and laying the price at the apostles’ feet” for the general good 
of the Christian community. Either the amount which he gave 
was peculiarly large, or there was something in his manner of 
giving which causes him to be singled out in this description of 

527 




528 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


self-denying generosity. The word generosity , better than any 
Dther, describes the character of Barnabas. The first incident 
from his life exhibits to us generosity in its literal sense of the 
free surrendering of property for the general good. But this i« 
by no means the main point on which we should lay hold 
striving to learn something from the example. Mere giving 
may arise from various motives. But the deep inward principle 
of generosity applies to all the conduct of life, and finds its exer- 
cise even when we have no property to give. A generous man 
is a man whose heart goes out freely and warmly toward others 
— who is not always thinking of himself — not calculating nicely 
how this or that will affect his own comfort, his own credit, his 
own position. Such a man is always ready for kind and neigh- 
borly acts. And such a man, too, can easily throw himself into 
mutual understanding and co-operation with others for the gene- 
ral good; whereas a man who is centred in himself is always 
liable to be mistaken and to mistake those around him. Let us 
illustrate this by a homely comparison. 

There is a characteristic difference between houses in the East 
and houses in the West. Our dwellings have their windows on 
the outside, from which we can look on the open country and see 
freely what is passing elsewhere. A domestic dwelling in the 
East, on the contrary, opens into an inner court, which presents 
the only view, while all around is the dead dull wall. There is 
something of the same kind of difference between one man and 
another. Some can easily begin frank and open communications 
with their neighbors ; other men cannot or will not. Barnabas 
is an example of the former, and he was all the happier in con- 
sequence, and all the more useful. 

And there is another mark of generosity, suggested by the 
passage we have quoted, which should not be overlooked. A 
generous man, acting on warm impulses, does not delay in doing 
good, but acts promptly and on the moment. The help wanted by 
the Christian community in Jerusalem was wanted then, and Bar- 


BARNABAS. 


529 


nabas gave it then. He might very naturally have considered 
the various reasons there were for delay. For instance, it was 
probable that similar need for assistance might occur on some 
future occasion. Besides this, many other persons were giving 
liberally at that time. But Barnabas did not reason in this 
way; probably he did not reason at all. And this at least we 
may learn from him, that when undoubted good is to be done, it 
is best to do it heartily and to do it now. 

We turn to the first of the passages which describe circum- 
stances in the life of Barnabas connected with Paul. Generosity 
is here again manifest, but in another and a more winning aspect. 
It was a most critical moment in Paul’s life and in the history 
of the Church. On his return to Jerusalem, after his sudden 
conversion at Damascus, he was naturally suspected. “He as- 
sayed to join himself to the disciples : but they were all afraid 
of him, and believed not that he was a disciple.” It is difficult 
to blame them, for what could they have thought of him ? Here 
was a man who had been their unscrupulous enemy, “breathing 
out slaughter and threatenings,” dragging “ both men and women 
into prison,” ready to undergo any toil and travel to any distance 
if only he might extirpate the Christians; and now this man was 
in Jerusalem again, professing to be their friend and wishing to 
be associated with them. They must have thought it was some 
contrivance, some stratagem arranged for their harm. It must 
be remembered that they were not then a powerful body, but 
very weak, with no protection from the authorities. They were 
like a flock of sheep; and they might well say of this son of 
Benjamin, in the sentiment applied to his great ancestor, lie 
ravins like a wolf : in the morning he devoured the prey : and 
now in the evening lie is dividing the spoil. Gen. xlix, 27. 

If we consider the crisis, we see how much harm would have 
come both to Paul’s personal comfort and happiness, and to his 
power of extending and consolidating the Church, if this most 
natural and most serious misunderstanding had not been re- 
34 


530 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


moved. The happy instrument of removing it was Barnabas. 
“ He took him, and brought him to the apostles, and declared 
unto them how he had seen the Lord in the way, and that he 
had spoken to him, and how he had preached boldly at Damas- 
cus in the name of Jesus.” The result was entire confidence and 
hearty co-operation in the cause of Christ. He who had been a 
persecutor was now with the apostles at Jerusalem, as a trusted 
friend and fellow-laborer, “ coming in and going out” and 
“ speaking boldly.” 

Misunderstandings are very common in this poor world of 
ours. People will differ without reason — will take unfavorable 
views of one another — will think they are on opposite sides when 
they are not really on opposite sides. When such a state of 
things is seen to arise, this is the great opportunity for those — 
and they are very numerous — who occupy themselves in gossip 
and making mischief. But this is also the Christian’s oppor- 
tunity for making peace and promoting co-operation in good 
and useful works. Let the reader ask himself what he is in the 
habit of doing in such a case. A very common habit with us is 
simply to look on, under such circumstances, and to be passive — 
possibly even to take a sort of pleasure in the infirmities of our 
neighbors. “ These people,” we say, “ will look upon one another 
as enemies when they ought to be friends ; they are very foolish, 
but we cannot help it,” and we do nothing. Such was not the 
view or the practice of Barnabas. And this system of letting 
things go crooked when we might do something toward putting 
them straight is really moral cowardice or moral laziness; and 
we must remember that we are responsible, not only for the harm 
which we positively cause, but in a great measure also for the 
evil which we might have prevented. 

Only it must be recollected that whatever good we do in this 
way must be done, not by harshness and rebuke, but by sym- 
pathy and persuasion. This is a principle of almost universal 
application, and to nothing is it more applicable than to cases 


BARNABAS. 


531 


of religious misunderstanding. But, most strangely, we are in 
the habit of forgetting this. We live in a time of much religious 
debate. If others hold wrong opinions, our wish is to induce 
them to adopt right opinions. But is it wise to attempt to secure 
this end by the method of attach f Let us ask any man to refer 
to his own experience. Were you ever convinced yourself by 
being attacked ? When you were assailed, was not your first 
impulse to resist and to shelter yourself as closely as possible 
within your old defences? You have heard the fable of the 
traveler, the wind and the sun. The traveler was enveloped in 
a thick cloak. The wind and the sun contended which of them 
could most easily induce him to lay the cloak aside. The wind 
made the attempt first. A furious storm came over the heavens, 
the trees were broken, the cattle were terrified, the cold sleet 
drove angrily across the plain. But the traveler drew his cloak 
more closely to him, and folded it round and round. And now 
the weather cleared. The landscape grew bright again. The 
sun’s turn was now come to make the attempt. As the warmth 
of the rays increased, the traveler gradually relaxed his hold. 
Each step made him feel that the cloak was more and more a 
burden ; he laid it aside ; and the sun had succeeded where the 
wind had failed. What could never have been done by violent 
attack was easily accomplished by gentle persuasion. Barnabas, 
at a critical time, not by harsh discussion, but by genial warmth, 
removed a prejudice; and we, following in his steps, may per- 
haps find many opportunities of doing the same. 

Nor is it merely the satisfaction and happiness of religious co- 
operation which is to be considered in such a case. Simple 
offices of Christian kindness may be of far greater moment to 
the community at large than can be calculated at the time. 
This incident in the life of Barnabas is of peculiar value, be- 
cause it shows us what great results may follow to the progress 
of the gospel from a single act of timely generosity. 

The second passage, which sets Barnabas before us in close 


532 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


companionship with the apostle, leads us to give him a very 
great place in the apostolic history, both for a far-seeing and 
enlightened intelligence, and for a noble and generous nature. 
News came to Jerusalem that the reception of the gospel was 
proceeding with unexampled success in the northern parts of 
Syria, especially in Antioch. The authorities of the Church felt 
instinctively that Barnabas was the fittest man to send on a 
mission of inquiry and encouragement. The account of his feel- 
ing and conduct on his arrival at Antioch is replete with in- 
formation concerning his mind and character. “ When he came 
and had seen the grace of God, he was glad.” We recognize 
here immediately one of those sure indications which are promi- 
nent in Paul's description of true Christian charity — viz., that it 
“rejoiceth in the truth.” And then follow words which exhibit 
Barnabas as a “son of exhortation”: “He exhorted them all, 
that with purpose of heart they would cleave to the Lord.” In 
all this there are the clear tokens of a genial, friendly and zealous 
disposition. Then, immediately below, it is added, “ For he was 
a good man, and full of the Holy Ghost and of faith” — a sen- 
tence which seems to concentrate in itself the full description of 
the man. Those who unite thus the inward power of divine 
grace with natural aptitude for persuasion are commonly success- 
ful. And the success of Barnabas at Antioch was great : “ Much 
people was added to the Lord.” 

Such occurrences, taking place in a city so populous, and so 
eminent both in political and mercantile life, were of peculiar 
moment to the future history of the Church. Barnabas evi- 
dently felt the critical value of the opportunity, for he decided 
to stay at Antioch. But something of still greater importance 
follows. He knew of Paul’s special mission to the Gentiles. 
He felt how desirable it was that his friend should be brought to 
labor in the midst of this movement of active thought and serious 
conviction at Antioch. Accordingly, he “ w^ent to Tarsus to seek 
Saul : and when he had found him, he brought him unto Antioch. 


BARNABAS. 


533 


And it came to pass that a whole year they assembled themselves 
with the Church, and taught much people.” 

We cannot dwell too carefully on this transaction, whether 
we wish to estimate the impulse thus given to the progress of 
Christianity, or to appreciate the distinctive features of the cha- 
racter of Barnabas. It was at Antioch, under the joint ministry 
of these two men, that the Church of Christ first became con- 
scious of itself, so to speak, as a great self-existent community, 
and received its proper designation. Acts xi. 26. From Antioch, 
too, proceeded the first grand missionary expedition of the Church 
in the persons of these two men. Acts xiii. 4. It is, however, 
rather the individual part played by Barnabas at this time on 
which we are here to dwell. His friend, since their last meet- 
ing, though fully recognized as a true disciple by the Christians 
at Jerusalem (and this recognition was due to Barnabas), had 
been driven away by persecution, and had been living and 
working in the shade at Tarsus. Certainly we cannot suppose 
him to have been idle. But it was Barnabas who gave him the 
great opportunity which was now open before him. Barnabas 
may be said, in a certain sense, to have made Paul what he after- 
ward became. He brought him out of obscurity. He put him 
in the fore-front, though he must have been well aware that he 
was likely to become more distinguished and powerful than 
himself. This is that peculiar mark of a generous disposition 
which was mentioned above — the absence of anxiety for personal 
credit, the readiness for friendly combination in useful under- 
takings without any selfish end in view. There are some men 
who have no heart for any enterprise unless they can have the 
first place in it. This is perhaps a prevalent temptation with 
most energetic characters. But this habit of mind is not accord- 
ing to the law laid down by Christ: “Whosoever will be chief 
among you, let him be your servant.” And Barnabas is a good 
example to show us how such temptation can be overcome. 

We do not wonder at the confidence which he inspired on 


534 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


various occasions, and in reference to very different subjects. 
Thus, when charitable contributions were soon afterward sent 
from Antioch to the poor Christians in Judea, he was chosen, 
with Paul, to convey the gift. At another time, when the two 
men were engaged in missionary work, and garlands and sacri- 
fices were brought out with the intention of doing worship to the 
apostles, the title which these poor idolaters of Lystra gave to 
Barnabas seems like a recognition of his benignity. Acts xiv. 12. 
And afterward, when a very serious religious question required 
to be settled, affecting the whole future condition of Gentile con- 
verts, he again was chosen, with three others, to convey the 
decisive letter from Jerusalem to Antioch; and it is said, in the 
very phrase which is the translation of his name, that when the 
letter was read “they rejoiced for the consolation.” Acts xv. 31. 

The first missionary journey had been happily accomplished, 
but soon after the close of it a sharp quarrel took place between 
the two men who had labored so well together. Their com- 
panion on the journey (John-Mark, a near relative of Barnabas’^ 
had been unfaithful in Pamphylia, had shrunk from the diffi- 
culties and dangers of the enterprise and had returned to his 
home. Acts xiii. 13. We are told, near the end of the fifteenth 
chapter, that Paul and Barnabas again proposed to “ go and visit 
their brethren in every city where they had preached the word 
of the Lord, to see how they fared.” The strong desire, and, 
indeed, determination, of Barnabas was to take his young relative 
along with them once more. “ But Paul thought it not good to 
take him with them who departed from them in Pamphylia, and 
went not with them to the work : and the contention was so 
sharp between them, that they departed asunder one from the 
other” and took different routes. 

After this event we have no further account of Barnabas, the 
rest of the book of the Acts of the Apostles being taken up with 
the life of Paul — the book being written by one of Paul’s com- 
panions. But tradition tells us that he went to Milan and 


BARNABAS. 


535 


became the first bishop of the church in that city. We have an 
epistle, in twenty-one chapters, called by the name of Barnabas, 
the authenticity of which has been defended by some great 
writers. But the candid student of the Bible needs no remains 
of this kind to make him revere the memory of this truly great 
and noble man. His deeds — of more worth than any words — 
however slight the record of them, entitle him to a place among 
the great founders of bur religion. And, personally, he stands 
among the first of the “men worth imitating” whose lives are 
given to us in the Bible. 




XLV. 

APOLLOS. 

HE first thing to be taken into account in estimating 
any man who has played an important part in life is 
the influence to which he was exposed in his early 
days. The associations of his youth, the place of his 
training, the manner of his education, — these things have usually 
much to do with the career which follows. 

Now, we know what Alexandria was. Even in the Acts of 
the Apostles we see it in its relations to the religions life of the 
Jews in Jerusalem, and to the world-wide commerce of heathen 
Italy. This city was a most remarkable meeting-place of East 
and West, and was characterized alike by mercantile and mental 
activity. Even the memory of Alexander, its great founder, 
would tend to produce breadth of view among the Alexandrians, 
to make them tolerant and less disposed than others to lay stress 
on national distinctions. Here, too, the Hebrew Scriptures were 
translated into Greek, and here a famous school of biblical in- 
terpretation grew up side by side with schools of Greek philoso- 
phy. Such mutual relations of Jews and heathens in this place 
were among the providential preparations for the spread of 
Christianity. 

In the midst of these influences Apollos was brought up, and 
the accomplishments thus acquired were of essential service to 
him in his future work. Even if we consider Alexandria only 
as a school of high education, a resort of learned men, and a 

536 



APOLLOS. 


537 


place affording opportunities, if rightly used, for the training of 
the mind, it is instructive to observe how God made use of such 
opportunities in preparing his servant for his appointed task. 
And this thought leads us to the homely but very useful remark, 
that we ought to set a high value on early training, even as re- 
gards this world’s studies. We cannot tell to what beneficial 
and religious purposes a good education may be made sub- 
servient. 

Another thought, too, is suggested by thus viewing Alexandria 
as the starting-point of Apollos. It is interesting to mark how 
God draws from different sources what is meant ultimately to 
flow together in one beneficent stream. The contrast between 
Paul’s training and that of Apollos was probably very great. 
The latter was nurtured in Greek scholarship at Alexandria; 
the former was “brought up” in rabbinical learning “at the feet 
of Gamaliel” in Jerusalem. Yet ’afterward they met and be- 
came fellow-workers in the cause of the gospel. It is an example 
full of instruction and encouragement to ourselves, inviting us, 
in regard to our own experience and our own co-operation with 
others, to consider and admire God’s providential ordering of 
the early steps of our lives. 

Hitherto we have been looking rather on the secular side, now 
we must turn to the more directly religious side, of the prepara- 
tion of Apollos for the work that was appointed him. And this 
we see comprised in two particulars : first, we find — as, indeed, 
we should expect from the circumstances of the case — that he 
was learned in the Old Testament Scriptures; next, we are told 
that he had received some instruction — only elementary, it is 
true, but still very important — in the facts and doctrines of 
Christianity. 

We cannot dwell too carefully on this, that it was through 
being “mighty in the Scriptures” that Apollos became mighty 
in other respects. This knowledge of the Jewish Bible, this ap- 
prehension of its meaning, this power of explaining and ill us- 


538 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


trating its contents, became the basis of all his subsequent useful- 
ness. It requires the exercise of but little thought to draw out 
all the benefit of this example for ourselves. With him this 
sacred possession was limited to the Old Testament. We have, 
in addition, the still higher blessing of the New; so that what- 
ever argument there was in his case for the acquisition of rich 
stores of biblical knowledge is immensely strengthened in ours. 

But though the Scriptures, with which Apollos was familiar, 
were simply the books of the Old Testament, he had obtained, 
before he came to Ephesus, some knowledge — and good know- 
ledge too, though imperfect — of the Christian revelation. He 
had been “ instructed in the way of the Lord” so as to be able 
to “ teach diligently the things of the Lord,” knowing, however, 
only the baptism of John. Whether he had come in contact 
with John the Baptist personally, or acquired his knowledge 
through some of those who had heard John’s preaching in Judea 
and who had gone from thence to Alexandria, we cannot tell. 
The latter supposition is the more probable. However this may 
be, he knew the gospel system up to the level of John’s teaching, 
and no higher. 

Now, here a remark may be made which is worthy of some 
attention. If Apollos knew all that John the Baptist had 
taught, he knew the most important part of Christianity, for 
John had said of Jesus, “Behold the Lamb of God which taketh 
away the sin of the world.” The gospel system, indeed, contains 
much more than this. In due time sacraments were instituted, 
a ministry was set apart, a great system of morals was given, 
applicable to all the circumstances of our lives, and the teaching 
and strengthening power of the Holy Ghost was made known 
and promised. But in these words of John the Baptist by the 
bank of Jordan we have the main point. However far our 
religious attainments may ultimately reach, it is here, in the 
redemption wrought out by Christ for sin, that we have the 
well-spring from which the rest flows out. Let us never lose 


APOLLOS. 


539 


this thought from our mind. In all our study, all our work, let 
the great central principle never be overlaid or forgotten. 

But now we begin to enter upon considerations which relate 
not so much to the advantages and opportunities that A polios 
possessed as to features of his personal character. 

It is said that he was “eloquent.” Now, on this I do not 
dwell, except so far as to note that God chooses his instruments 
suitably. Eloquence is a gift bestowed only on a few. We may 
be very useful without eloquence. We may be very mischievous 
with eloquence. The point of real moment to all of us here is 
that in the case of Apollos this gift was sanctified and turned to 
a religious use. 

A similar remark, too, might perhaps be made regarding his 
“ fervency of spirit.” Apollos was evidently a man of warm 
temperament, and temperaments vary; some are naturally warmer 
than others. And yet is it not evident that there must be warmth 
wherever the true love of Christ is present ? There must be en- 
thusiasm where Christ has been received fully into the heart; 
and enthusiasm in ourselves is God’s instrument for kindling 
enthusiasm in others. So that in this respect, too, there is some- 
thing for every one of us to learn from Apollos, and to make the 
groundwork of self-examination. 

But the same sentence presents to us another feature which 
might not at first sight attract our notice. “This man was in- 
structed in the way of the Lord ;” “ he taught diligently the 
things of the Lord;” he learnt the way of God “more per- 
fectly.” From these phrases — especially as read in the original 
Greek — I should infer that he had that habit of mind which we 
call accuracy; and it is a most important habit — far more im- 
portant than is commonly supposed. The difference between 
one man and another in regard to real influence in the world 
relates not so much to amount of knowledge as accuracy of 
knowledge. Moreover, progressive advance in religious know- 
ledge depends, at each step, upon accuracy. And now we ask 


540 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


the further question : On what does accuracy depend ? The 
answer is easy. For the most part it depends upon attention. 
An inattentive learner never becomes an accurate scholar. Justly, 
then, do we lay great stress on attention in the teaching of the 
young. The exercise, too, of this faculty depends in a great 
measure upon ourselves; so that here again Apollos is brought 
face to face with our own experience, and gives to us in his 
example a most useful admonition. 

But at this point — in the mode of his coming in contact with 
Aquila and Priscilla, and so indirectly with Paul — we begin to 
note a moral and religious feature of Apollos which merits our 
special attention, because it is singularly characteristic of him, as 
well as full of beneficial suggestions to ourselves. When Aquila 
and Priscilla had heard Apollos in the synagogue, “they took 
him unto them and expounded unto him the way of God more 
perfectly.” These two Jewish Christians — as we learn from the 
early part of the chapter — were “tent-makers” with whom Paul 
had made acquaintance at Corinth, and whom he had left at 
Ephesus a short time previous to the arrival of Apollos. They 
became the religious instructors of this Alexandrian stranger, 
who in their hands was a most willing learner. Thus, here we 
have an eloquent man, a learned man, a fervent man, not un- 
willing to be taught, and taught too by plain and humble people 
who were engaged in business. One of these teachers, too, was 
a woman. It was not from a theological college that Apollos 
obtained his advanced religious instruction. In making this 
observation we are certainly not justified in suggesting that 
Scripture throws any contempt on learning or scholarship. We 
have seen the very contrary above, in the cases both of this Jew 
of Alexandria and of Paul himself. Still, the fact is as stated 
here. % The secular training of Apollos came from a very dis- 
tinguished source, his high religious training from a very lowly 
one. How often has this been the case since ! Those who have 
been eminent in university honors have often learned their best 


APOLLOS. 


541 


lessons of religion even from the poor, and often from women, in 
the retired hoars of domestic life. By such methods God’s provi- 
dence brings all parts of a man’s experience into harmony, and 
causes all to bear upon the one point of active service. Those 
men who produce great religious results on the minds of others 
have usually drawn their own teaching from very various sources. 
Many things are made tributary to that stream of wide influence 
which in the end flows full and strong. But there must be a 
teachable spirit if the benefits are to be fully realized. We must 
become children if we are to be high in the kingdom of heaven. 
This was exemplified in the instance of Apollos. Let it be our 
honest desire that it may be exemplified in ours ! 

Next we turn to notice the active career of usefulness on which 
he now entered. Equipped, as we have seen, with varied know- 
ledge, he was filled with a noble zeal to make that knowledge 
fruitful. His desires turned with characteristic energy to a dis- 
tant scene of labor; nor is it difficult to conjecture the reason 
which attracted his thoughts toward Corinth. The name and 
importance of the place were very familiar to him. Alexandria, 
Ephesus and Corinth were connected together by the intercourse 
of constant trade. But especially his friends Aquila and Pris- 
cilla w r ould, in their conversation, be constantly speaking of 
Paul’s work in Achaia, where they first had met him. The 
names of his chief converts, too, would be frequently mentioned, 
with the difficulties and troubles of the young Christian com- 
munity in that district. Thus Apollos was seized with the desire 
of doing public service on the field which was prepared to his 
hand, and of continuing the work which Paul had already begun, 
and Aquila and Priscilla were in nowise loth to encourage him 
in the enterprise. They evidently rejoiced in the prospect of such 
aid being given to their Corinthian friends, whom they knew to 
be in the midst of perilous temptations. “The brethren” in 
Ephesus shared these feelings, “and wrote, exhorting the dis- 
ciples to receive” Apollos. The mention of this fact is full of 


542 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


interest, for it is the first recorded instance of commendatory 
letters — a kind of correspondence which became, in the times 
that immediately succeeded, an instrument of the utmost value 
for binding together the separated parts of the growing Church. 
Armed with such letters, A poll os crossed the sea from Ephesus 
to Corinth, and the result is told in forcible though simple lan- 
guage : “ When he was come to Corinth, he helped them much 
which had believed through grace ; for he mightily convinced 
the Jews, and that publicly, showing by the Scriptures that 
Jesus was Christ.” 

What a great position was this, to be the organ of friendly 
communication between two churches, to bind together two parts 
of the Christian community, and to communicate strength where 
strength was needed ! And let it not be forgotten that helping 
work of this kind, on a smaller or larger scale, is within the 
power of us all. 

Here it is that we see the exertions of Paul and Apollos in the 
cause of the gospel, though starting from two different points, 
brought harmoniously into one focus. Attempts, indeed, were 
made, too successfully, to separate the church of Corinth into 
antagonistic sections connected with the names of these two men, 
but in heart and intention their work was one. Just in this mo- 
ment of Paul’s life it is that the First Epistle to the Corinthians 
comes in, to enable us to continue the biography of Apollos, and 
to obtain from it fresh lessons very useful for our times. 

The Epistle, soon after its opening, makes very pointed allu- 
sions to Apollos. After introductory salutations, thanksgiving 
r.nd advice, the apostle begins his rebuke suddenly: "It hath 
been declared unto me of you, my brethren, by them which are 
of the house of Chloe, that there are contentions among you. 
Now this I say, that every one of you saith, I am of Paul ; and 
I of Apollos ; and I of Cephas ; and I of Christ and again, 
after an interval, he returns to the same subject thus : “ Whereas 
there is among you envying, and strife, and divisions, are ye not 


APOLLOS. 


543 


carnal, and walk as men? For while one saith, I am of Paul ; 
and another, I am of Apollos; are ye not carnal? Who then is 
Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, 
even as the Lord gave to every man ? I have planted, Apollos 
watered; but God gave the increase.” At this point it is worth 
while to notice, in passing, how exactly, and yet how Uncon- 
sciously — so to speak — the facts here implied harmonize with 
the history which we find in the Acts. The Corinthians are re- 
minded that Apollos continued among them the work which 
Paul had begun. Paul arrived first at Corinth, Apollos after- 
ward. But this is not all. It is implied that Apollos had been 
there in the interval between Paul’s personal visit on the second 
missionary journey and the writing of this letter, which we know 
to have taken place at Ephesus on the third missionary journey. 

The arrival of this learned, eloquent and fervent man, though 
intended for the spreading and deepening of practical religion, 
had been followed by the formation of religious parties. Some 
of these Corinthian Christians had a preference for Paul, some 
for Apollos. So they ranged themselves in different sections and 
called themselves by different names. All this was very natural, 
though very wrong. Each of these two missionaries of Christ 
had his own peculiar gifts and means of influence. In all that 
we usually sum up under the term popularity, Apollos was prob- 
ably far superior. On the other hand, Paul had been first in the 
field, had founded the church in Corinth and came with supreme 
authority. Besides this, individual hearts and minds had been 
relatively brought more closely into contact with the one or the 
other. Thus that deplorable growth of party spirit took place 
at Corinth which has had its counterpart ever since in all ages 
of the Church. 

It is not needed here to attempt any discrimination of the 
exact characteristics of these parties in Corinth, nor, indeed, is 
this an easy task. It is more important for us to ascertain the 
cure lor this evil tendency among ourselves. The true remedy 


544 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


is to be found in those general principles which Paul enunciates 
in this Epistle. We are to look up to that one commrn divine 
source from whence all gifts and graces proceed. He reminds 
the Corinthians that they are to think even of their greatest 
teachers — whether they were Apollos or Paul himself — as 
“ ministers” through whom God works in them spiritual good. 
They are not to exalt one at the expense of another. They are 
to view all the spiritual benefit that comes to them by human 
instrumentality as sent by God. “ Let no man glory in men,” 
he says ; “ for all things are yours — whether Paul or Apollos, or 
things present, or things to come — all are yours.” 

Now, the question arises — and in estimating his character it is 
quite essential to answer the question — whether this party spirit 
which was developed at Corinth was in any way the fault of 
Apollos, and whether, when it was developed, he encouraged : t 
at all. Here another passage from the latter part of the same 
Epistle presents itself to our attention, and supplies the answer. 
The apostle writes : “ As touching our brother Apollos, I greatly 
desired him to come unto you with the brethren : but hi3 will 
was not at all to come at this time : but he will come when he 
shall have convenient time.” We perceive that by this time 
Apollos had left Corinth and returned to Ephesus, and that he 
and Paul were in personal companionship together. It is the 
first record which we possess of their actual meeting, though in- 
directly, as we have seen, they had been in active co-operation. 
At Ephesus they had abundant opportunity of conversing to- 
gether concerning the state of things in Corinth, and viewed in 
the light of this fact, the verse before us is very instructive. 
There is no doubt that, with so much zeal, so much learning, so 
much eloquence, so much popularity, Apollos might have made 
himself eminent as a party leader. In most ages of the Church 
such gifts have been used, too willingly, for such purposes. But 
this Apollos would not do. There are good reasons, as we have 
seen, for believing that in some attractive qualities he was far 


APOLLOS. 


545 


superior to Paul. But he preferred the safety and welfare of the 
Church to his own self-aggrandizement. And how considerate is 
his conduct, as made known to us on this occasion ! Paul wished 
him to go to Corinth at this time, but for the present he firmly 
declined ; his appearance there would only have been the signal 
for a new outbreak of this party-spirit. 

And indeed how admirable is the conduct of these two apos- 
tolic men one toward another ! Their mutual relation, with the 
personal feeling exhibited on each side at a critical time, must be 
specially observed. Nor is there any difficulty in seeing, on the 
part of Paul, the most perfect confidence that Apollos would not 
abuse an opportunity ; and, on the other side, the most delicate 
and thoughtful respect for Paul, and the utmost reluctance on 
the part of Apollos to run any risk of exalting himself at the ex- 
pense of another. What an example of self-restraint and mutual 
consideration is presented to us here ! Such an example ought 
to be carefully followed. It is this kind of forbearance which 
maintains and strengthens friendship, and secures the continuance 
of co-operation in Christian work. 

Friendships thus cemented last long and bear many strains. 
We are not surprised by the anxiety shown by Paul long after- 
ward for the comfort of Apollos in the prospect of a fatiguing 
journey. In his Epistle to Titus we find this message: “ Bring 
Zenas the lawyer and Apollos on their journey diligently, that 
nothing be wanting unto them.” Tit. iii. 13. Of Zenas we know 
nothing, but of Apollos we know much, and we might reasonably 
conjecture from this passage that he and the apostle had been 
brought into continually nearer companionship, and that they 
had often traveled together. 

This meditation on the life and work of Apollos, imperfect as 
it is, may at least serve as an illustration of the large amount of 
religious instruction which we may secure to ourselves from the 
study of a Scripture character. Recognition of God’s hand in 
our early training, a good and conscientious use of opportunities, 
35 


546 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


a ready zeal for Christ’s service, humility in learning from those 
who are farther advanced in the Christian course than ourselves, 
a cheerful rendering of timely help to those around us, a firm 
discountenancing of factious party spirit, a considerate care for 
the reputation and comfort of others, — can we not all, through 
the Holy Spirit’s aid, form such habits of mind as these ? The 
example of ApoJlos is not above the standard at which we ought 
to aim. Sometimes the characters of Scripture seem far removed 
from our own experience, and to belong to another world. Not 
so here. The pattern is quite on our own level, and singularly 
suitable for our own times. 

This is just the kind of life which, if we are true Christians, 
we must desire to lead. And we may revert, as we end, to one 
encouraging thought to which expression was given in the begin- 
ning of this sketch. The providential guiding of Apollos was 
very remarkable. His early knowledge of Christianity began at 
Alexandria; his mature training was received, and his active 
work began, at Ephesus ; his distinguished public career was run 
at Corinth. Thus three great cities saw the three stages of his 
religious progress. Or we may set before our minds this fact of 
providential guidance in another way. Paul, apparently by acci- 
dent, meets Aquila and Priscilla at Corinth. There, through 
intercourse with him, they become fitted for influence on a large 
scale. At Ephesus, Apollos is brought under this beneficial in- 
fluence. And finally he is laboring at Corinth on the foundation 
laid by Paul, while the apostle is again co-operating with Aquila 
and Priscilla in Ephesus. We may justly put all this side by 
side with our own experience in regard to changes of home, of 
occupation, of companionship, and may draw from it the com- 
fortable assurance that, wherever we are, if we have a true desire 
to serve God, he will provide for us suitable work and, so far as 
we need, Christian sympathy. 



XLVI. 

TIMOTHY. 

last panel in our gallery of sacred portraits must 
IpS? be filled with a slight sketch of Timothy. Our best 
course is to follow his life chronologically, making 
such reflections from point to point as naturally sug- 
gest themselves. The Epistles enable us to begin our survey 
from an earlier point than any which is presented to us in the 
Acts of the Apostles, and show us something of the training of 
Timothy in his early childhood, and something of his prepara- 
tion for that subsequent usefulness which marked his career 
when he became connected in labors with the great apostle to 
the Gentiles. 

The first actual mention of Timothy in Luke’s narrative is in 
the sixteenth chapter of the Acts, where he is described as the 
son of a Jewess who had become a Christian. This prominent 
mention of his mother is somewhat remarkable ; and from another 
source we learn her actual name, and something, too, of her cha- 
racter. Paul, in his latest letter, when writing of the “ unfeigned 
faith” that was in Timothy, adds that such faith had “ dwelt 
first in his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice ;” and in 
another part of the same document he charges him to " continue 
in the things which he had learned, knowing of whom he had 
learned them; and that from a child he had known the holy 
Scriptures.” Thus we see that on the feminine side of the family 

547 


548 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


there had been, for two generations at least, the inestimable bless- 
ing of hereditary piety. 

It is not a little remarkable that a character which is among 
the most faultless and charming in the Bible should be the cha- 
racter of that one person whose domestic relations and early 
training are thus described. And this circumstance is the more 
observable if we can trace — as we can almost certainly — some- 
thing of a feminine softness in Timothy, as though his mother’s 
gentle influence had passed into his mind and disposition. The 
method , too, of his early training is very important for us to 
notice. It was the method of biblical instruction . From a 
child he knew the holy Scriptures. Those Scriptures, of course, 
in his case, were the Old Testament. We are richer than the 
Jews by reason of possessing the New Testament in addition. 
This does not diminish, but rather infinitely increases, the weight 
we should attach to the Bible as an instrument of instruction. 
But, again, not only the method, but the spiritual principle, 
which was at work in this process should be noticed. Even in 
the Acts of the Apostles the faith of Eunice is made prominent ; 
and here we see that it was the ruling power of life both in her 
case and in that of Lois. This passage of Holy Writ is full of 
admonition to Christian households as to the training of the 
young, and full of encouragement as to the happy results which 
may be expected from such training. 

In tracing this biography onward, we are able still to insert 
another stage of it before we reach the point where the first 
mention of Timothy occurs in the Acts. Paul had been at 
Lystra previously to the time when this young disciple actually 
joined him there as his traveling companion. Moreover, the 
apostle speaks of him as "his own son in the faith,” which 
seems to imply beyond a doubt that he himself was the instru- 
ment of his conversion. On the occasion, too, of this second 
visit, Eunice is described as already a believer. All these cir- 
cumstances point to the conclusion that Timothy was converted 


TIMOTHY , ; 


549 


on the occasion of the first visit. And this derives a strong con- 
firmation from a passage in the Second Epistle to Timothy. 
There it is said that he had fully known and closely followed 
“the persecutions and afflictions” which came to Paul “at An- 
tioch, at Iconium, at Lystra.” Now, these sufferings occurred 
to him on the first visit, and the order in which the places are 
mentioned is the exact geographical order in which Paul was ex- 
posed to these trials. And this again leads to another thought. 
Such sufferings and ill treatment incurred by one who is beloved 
and respected make a deep impression upon a young mind, and 
we see in this earliest acquaintance of Paul and Timothy the 
foundations deeply laid of a warm attachment and allegiance of 
the latter to the former, as well as an admirable preparation for 
arduous work and strong endurance. Nor must we forget that 
the circumstances thus related would bring Timothy into per- 
sonal acquaintance with Paul’s earliest missionary companions, 
and we cannot well doubt that at this time he became familial 

y 

with the noble countenance of him whom the rude Lycaonians 
instinctively “called Jupiter,” as well as with the voice of him 
whom they named “ Mercurius, because he was the chief 
speaker.” Acts xiv. 12. 

Barnabas ceased to be Paul’s missionary companion, and Silas 
was taken in his place. We have now passed from the first mis- 
sionary journey to the second, and are brought to the association 
of Timothy with Paul in the actual work of evangelization. 
This point in the apostolic history is carefully marked by 
Luke, and it is full of instruction for us as to the duty of re- 
quiring in those who are to be placed in high ministerial offices 
the qualification of ascertained fitness. We should also set the 
passage side by side with sentences in each of the two Epistles to 
Timothy. Just as Paul urged the memory of this disciple’s 
mother and grandmother to stimulate him to consistency and 
progress in piety, so he urges him to “stir up the gift of God” 
which manifestly had been bestowed upon him at the time of the 


550 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


“ laying on of hands” by the apostles and the general body of 
the presbyters. Evidence was fully supplied as to his personal 
character at this time. “He was well reported of by all the 
brethren that were at Lystra and Iconium.” A further reason 
also for the choice is to be discovered in the words which follow : 
“ Him would Paul have to go forth with him.” It is not ob- 
scurely intimated here that there was something in Timothy 
which won the apostle’s personal affection . He seems to have 
perceived from the very first — to quote the phrase w T hich he used 
long afterward to his friend — that he was “ like-minded ” with 
himself, and great must have been his joy to have found such a 
companion in the very neighborhood which, a few years before, 
had been the scene of so much injustice and suffering. And still 
another point of fitness for this moment of missionary work re- 
mains to be noted. It was a crisis in the history of the Church 
in regard to the relation between Judaism and Christianity. 
More need not be said in order to show that in the choice of a 
fellow-worker for Paul’s future labors there was peculiar wisdom 
in selecting one whose mother was a Jewess, “ while his father 
was a Greek.” 

The devotion of Timothy and the devotion of his mother also 
-were shown by his willingness to leave her for Christ’s service, 
and the blessing was theirs which the Lord himself promised to 
such “ forsaking” of home “ for his name’s sake.” We now pass 
to the active employment of Timothy in missionary work, on his 
second apostolic journey, in conjunction with Paul and his other 
companions. From this point he took part in the whole Mace- 
donian round, and became one of the founders of the great 
churches of Philippi and Thessalonica. His name, indeed, is 
not mentioned by Luke in connection with either place. But 
we have the apostle’s weighty words in testimony of his faithful 
service at the former city : “ Ye know the proof of him , that as a 
son with his father, he served with me in the gospel.” That he 
was not imprisoned there with Paul and Silas is easily accounted 


TIMOTHY. 


551 


for by his comparative youth and subordination. There might, 
indeed, be some timidity in his conduct, but we trace his sub- 
ordination by the order of the three names in the Epistles written 
soon after to Thessalonica ; and it should be remarked, by the 
way, that these Epistles imply a familiar knowledge of him in 
that city also. Passing on from Thessalonica to Berea, we find 
him brought into contact with earnest discussions on the mean- 
ing of those Scriptures with which he had been made so well 
acquainted in his childhood at home; and here his name re- 
appears in the text of the narrative. It is stated that he and 
Silas were left behind in Macedonia, with instructions to rejoin 
the apostle as soon as their errand should be discharged, and 
they did rejoin him when he was established in Corinth. 

It was arranged in the course of God’s providence that Paul 
should have no companion with him in Athens, and the fact that 
he was “alone” in that city enhances the force of the unique im- 
pression we receive from that most remarkable passage of his life. 
But what we read of the effect produced upon his mind and work 
when Timothy, with Silas, rejoined him, tends to show us how 
much his happiness was increased by the presence of his friends, 
and what a reserve of actual religious force resided in him in the 
mere fact of companionship. Some are too ready to throw upon 
others the work which they ought to do themselves, but he in- 
creased in zeal and activity when he could obtain others to help 
him. The literal meaning of the passage is that oil their coming 
ho was “ engrossed ” or “ absorbed” in “ the work.” The writing 
of the Epistles to Thessalonica, which followed close upon the 
arrival of Timothy, shows the high estimate which Paul had 
formed of him. In allusion to the mission with which he had 
been recently charged, he describes him as “ his brother ,” as “the 
minister of God ” and as “hiS fellow-laborer in the gospel of 
Christ^ Nor ought we to fail to notice the confidence implied 
in the mission itself. Serious troubles had occurred in Thes- 
salonica, and this young disciple was sent to “establish” them 


552 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


and to “ comfort them concerning their faith,” so that they 
“ should not be moved by these afflictions.” Even tin’s slight 
notice of what took place during the apostle’s journey in Mace- 
donia and Achaia affords a testimony to many excellent and 
remarkable qualities in one so young and so lately introduced 
into the work of missionary life. It is also evident that the 
journey afforded opportunities for gaining invaluable experience. 

We have no means of supplying any information concerning 
Timothy in the interval between his residence at Corinth and 
the time when the third missionary journey was well begun. 
He and Silas were, as we have seen, together with the apostle at 
Corinth. There is every reason to believe that they traveled with 
him thence, touching at Ephesus on the way, to “ the feast in 
Jerusalem.” Possibly Silas remained in Jerusalem ; at all events, 
we do not trace him in company with Paul on the subsequent 
journey. But Timothy is with him still. And when the apostle 
is at Ephesus, we find him going over once more, in compliance 
with his desire, on an errand into Macedonia. Here his name is 
associated with that of Erastus, as formerly with that of Silas. 
“Paul purposed in the spirit, when he had passed through 
Macedonia and Achaia, to go to Jerusalem : so he sent into 
Macedonia two of them that ministered to him, Timotheus and 
Erastus.” Here we see the same obedience and alacrity on the 
part of Timothy, the same confidence on the part of Paul. The 
mode of expression shows that they were intended to prepare his 
way. If Timothy was to occupy himself with the details of the 
collection which Paul was at this time busily promoting, even 
that implied a character well known to be honorable, discreet 
and trustworthy. But if he was commissioned to assuage, if 
possible, the party spirit, and to correct the abuses at Corinth, 
qualities were implied of a still higher and rarer kind. That he 
was directed to proceed to Corinth we have good proof, and the 
terms in which he is spoken of in the First Epistle to that place, 
written soon after his departure, deserve attention. Paul says 


TIMOTHY. 


553 


in one passage, “ I have sent unto you Timotheus, who is my 
beloved son , and faithful in the Lord , who shall bring you into 
remembrance of my ways which be in Christ, as I teach every- 
where in every church.” Nothing can be more expressive of deep 
affection and confidential trust; and it may be added, by the 
way, that if Timothy knew so well what the apostle taught 
“ everywhere in every church/’ it seems natural to infer that he 
had been with him in many places where no mention occurs of 
his name. We are not surprised to read what he says in another 
part of the same letter : “ If Timotheus come, see that he may be 
with you without fear, for he worketh the work of the Lord, as 
I also do.” Much time had now elapsed since those two friends 
had been associated together in this “ work of the Lord many 
new circumstances must have occurred to put the character of 
Timothy to a severe trial ; the confidence, however, of the apostle 
had not been diminished, but rather increased. The relationship 
remained the same as it had been when they w T ere formerly to- 
gether at Corinth, and when the gospel was preached among the 
Corinthians — to use his own words in the Second Epistle — “ by 
me and Silvanus and Timotheus.” And if in this anxious wish 
that his friend should be exposed to no fear there is an indication 
of some timidity of temperament in Timothy, such a circumstance 
brings us nearer to him in sympathy, while it enables us to ap- 
preciate more fully the affection which was felt toward him by 
Paul. 

We have seen that the Epistles to the Corinthians enable us 
to trace a considerable amount of the occupation of Timothy on 
this journey, while Paul was outward bound. We can also de- 
tect his presence with the apostle at Corinth, the farthest point 
of the journey ; for in the Epistle to the Romans, written there, 
we find, “ Timotheus my workfellow saluteth you.” We have 
no means of illustrating the homeward route in this way; but at 
Ephesus or in Macedonia or at Corinth we feel almost sure that 
he must have met Apollos and Titus, as well as Aquila and 


554 


GREAT MEN OF GOD . 


Priscilla, and when we see the apostle moving eastward, we find 
him expressly associated with a large group of companions. 
“ There accompanied him into Asia, Sopater of Berea ; and of 
the Thessalonians, Aristarchus and Secundus; and Gaius of 
Derbe, and Timotheus; and of Asia, Tychicus and Trophimus.” 
How long this large apostolic company continued to travel to- 
gether we do not know. Some of them were probably trustees 
for the collection which Paul had been gathering for “ the poor 
saints at Jerusalem.” Sopater of Berea, or Aristarchus and 
Secundus of Thessalonica, may have returned to Macedonia 
from the neighborhood of Ephesus. It is very likely that 
Tychicus remained there, and possible that Timothy with Gaius 
went together to their native neighborhoods of Derbe and Lystra. 
We have no means of deciding the question. All that we know 
is, that he is not mentioned at any subsequent part of the voyage. 
Nor is he named in the account of that commotion which took 
place at Jerusalem immediately after the apostle’s arrival. 
Trophimus, who had been one of the company at Troas, is 
named ; he was the innocent cause of Paul’s trouble and suffer- 
ing; but the name of Timothy appears nowhere. Nor is he 
spoken of during the time of the imprisonment at Csesarea. So 
that we are not able in any way to associate him in our thoughts 
with Felix or with Festus. 

Again, on the voyage from Csesarea to Rome, it appears 
almost certain that Timothy cannot have been with Paul, though 
Aristarchus, another of the Troas party, was with him. Neither 
on the slow progress from Csesarea to Myra, nor in the haven on 
the south coast of Crete, nor on board the ship during the storm, 
nor in the shipwreck, nor during the three months in Malta, nor 
on the fine and rapid sail from Malta to the west of Italy, does 
Luke find any occasion for mentioning Timothy. It is natural 
to conclude that he was not present. But we know from the 
Epistles that he soon rejoined his friend in Rome. In the open- 
ing of the letters to the Colossians and Philemon, the two names 


TIMOTHY. 


555 


appear linked together, just as had been the ease in those earliest 
letters sent from Corinth to Thessalonica. Then it was “ Paul 
and Silvanus and Timotheus now it is “ Paul and Timotheus.” 
Silas is not associated with Paul as formerly, but the close link 
between him and Timothy still subsists, unbroken by lapse of 
years and by change of circumstances. And may we not say 
that the union of these names in the beginning of these letters 
denotes not only similarity of sentiment, but community of 
action, if not- a certain kind of official connection? Other com- 
panions are mentioned in the letters — Demas, for instance, and 
Luke himself — but they only send a message of Christian love 
near the close ; their signatures are not prefixed to the writing 
in the formal sending of “ grace and peace.” So pre-eminent is 
the confidence placed in Timothy by Paul. 

The same remark applies to the Epistle to the Philippians, 
"which belongs to the same imprisonment. But here a passage 
occurs of so much importance that it must be quoted at length. 
u I trust in the Lord Jesus,” says the writer, “ to send Timotheus 
shortly unto you, that I also may be of good comfort, when I know 
your state. For I have no man like-minded, who will naturally 
care for your state. For ail seek their own, not the things which 
&re Jesus Christ’s. But ye know the proof of him, that as a son 
with the father, he hath served with me in the gospel. Him 
therefore I hope to send presently, so soon as I shall see how it 
will go with me.” Very full and varied information regarding 
the character of Timothy is given to us in this passage. He is 
contrasted with others as being thoroughly like-minded with the 
apostle, as having a true and entire sympathy with him, and as 
being one who could take an honest and genuine interest in the 
best prosperity of the Philippians. It is implied, too, that he is 
very different from others, who seek their own advantage and not 
the honor of Christ ; and it is asserted that he had always shown 
the utmost obedience to the apostle in all that related to the gos- 
pel, being to him as a son to a father ; and the Philippians are 


556 


GREAT MEN OF GOD. 


directly appealed to as knowing, by what they had seen them- 
selves, that this was perfectly true. 

Such is the character which we can read in the Epistles written 
during Paul’s first imprisonment, and sent by Onesimus and 
Epaphroditus, with whom we are sure that Timothy must have 
conversed often and earnestly. There remain the Epistles written 
to Timothy himself in a subsequent period, of which we must 
not attempt to furnish the details. Whatever journeys by land 
or voyages by sea filled up this concluding space of the great 
apostle’s life, whatever privations or difficulties Timothy him- 
self may have then incurred, one thing is very plain — that he was 
still at his master’s service, ready to stay wherever he might be 
stationed, ready to go wherever he might be sent. “ I besought 
thee to abide in Ephesus, when I went into Macedonia this is 
the language of the First Epistle. “ Do thy diligence to come 
shortly unto me : do thy diligence to come before winter this 
is the language of the Second. Still it is the same relationship 
of a son to a father. Still there is the same obedience on one 
side, still the same confidence on the other. “ My beloved son ” 
is the phrase of one Epistle; “My own son in the faith” is the 
phrase of the other. How great was the trust reposed in Timothy 
is evident from the commissions which these letters convey. * He 
is to repress false doctrine, to regulate public worship, to ordain 
faithful ministers, and, above all, to be an example “ in word, in 
conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity.” 

And as, in all records of friendship, it is not anything con- 
nected with the discharge of public or official responsibilities 
which leaves the most abiding and definite impression on the 
mind, but usually some slight incidental circumstances, that in- 
dicate the presence of a deep undercurrent of personal feeling, 
so, in the present instance, the mention of common details, such 
as might occur in the correspondence of any two friends, comes 
to our aid, enabling us quite easily and naturally to give the last 
and most characteristic touch to our picture : “ The cloak that I 


TIMOTHY. 


557 


left at Troas with Carpus, when thou comest, bring with thee, 
and the books, but especially the parchments.” Even in this 
there is something which seizes strongly on the imagination. 
We should be glad to know what those books, what those parch- 
ments, were. But another passage of the same kind attracts us 
still more. In the midst of very serious injunctions, the thought 
of the delicate health of Timothy, and of the danger into which 
he might fall of neglecting one of his means of usefulness, seems 
to occur to the affectionate apostle, and he says, “ Drink no 
longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake, and 
thine often infirmities.” We might with benefit use this passage 
as an indication of the temperance of Timothy, and thus as an 
example to ourselves. Though of a delicate constitution, in- 
herited, perhaps, from his mother, and though liable to weakness 
and suffering often from fatigue, he was strictly abstemious. But 
here the quotation is adduced simply to illustrate the personal 
intimacy which subsisted to the end between the great apostle 
and the dearest of his companions. 


THE END, 








































































































































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